Last year the AA commissioned the TMS Consultancy to help in promoting action from the AA Foundation for Road Safety research studies. As part of this exercise, the AA and TMS gathered together a panel of top road safety auditors - seven of the country's experts, from England, Scotland and Wales and from a mixture of urban and rural authorities - who between them have been involved with several thousand audits. They were asked to provide, independently, a list of their "top-20" commonly encountered audit problems and to supply examples. There was surprisingly close agreement between the auditors. Within the "top twenty" the same problems came up time and time again. Provision for pedestrians featured (twice), people with disabilities (twice), cyclists (3), motorcyclists (once), and vehicle users (7 times). The output from this exercise will be a "where do we go wrong" booklet to be published later this year, aimed mainly at design engineers, but also at policy makers and politicians, giving the latter groups an insight into the design and safety audit process. It will show the most commonly identified design problems.
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