Roads are public spaces. They belong, in principle, to everyone – the driver commuting to work, the cyclist threading through traffic, the pedestrian stepping off the kerb, the horse and rider rounding a blind bend on a country lane. Yet in practice, roads have been designed, regulated and culturally understood for over a century around a single dominant user: the motorist. Everyone else occupies the margins, negotiating their safety in a system that was not built with them in mind.

In April 2026, Project EDWARD's First Friday series brought together two thinkers who approach this problem from very different angles. Dr Santiago Amietta, from the University of Keele, researches how law, justice and everyday life intersect, including who gets heard when we design and regulate public space. Alan Hiscox, Director of Safety at the British Horse Society, leads the Dead Slow campaign and works daily with riders, drivers and authorities on the very concrete, daily challenge of sharing roads safely.

Their conversation was framed around the idea of democratic roads – a concept that sounds abstract until you examine what its absence actually costs. It costs horses their lives. It costs communities their voice. It costs vulnerable road users the confidence to claim their right to use public space. And it costs us, as a society, the safety outcomes we should be achieving.

For ARRM members, this discussion lands at an important moment. The government's 2026 Road Safety Strategy, released in January, and the first in over a decade, sets out an ambition to reduce killed and seriously injured (KSI) casualties by 65% by 2035. That ambition will only be achieved if the strategy addresses not just the mechanics of road safety, but the deeper question of who roads are for. This article draws on the Project EDWARD discussion to explore that question and what it demands in practice.

Ten years of Dead Slow: Progress, and the work still to do

The April First Friday discussion opened with a milestone: ten years of the British Horse Society's Dead Slow campaign, launched in 2016 to encourage drivers to slow to 10 mph and pass at least 2 metres wide when approaching horses on the road.

The progress is real. Between 2024 and 2025, the BHS recorded a 10% decrease in reported incidents and a 15% fall in road rage incidents involving horses. Alan Hiscox is encouraged by anecdotal evidence that the 2022 Highway Code changes, which formalised the hierarchy of road users and introduced explicit guidance on passing horses, appear to be influencing younger drivers in particular, with riders reporting more considerate overtaking from those who have learned under the new rules.

But horse deaths on the road went up from 2024 to 2025. An average of 56 horses were killed annually over the campaign's ten-year span. And the deeper structural issues – the absence of equestrian voices from policy processes, the postcode lottery in how incidents are handled, the lack of off-road alternatives – remain largely unresolved.

That lived experience of a significant group of road users being routinely overlooked is at the core of the democratic roads argument. Horse riders are not a fringe interest. With 56 horses killed on roads annually, and thousands of serious incidents, this is a measurable road safety problem that deserves a systematic response. The BHS was disappointed not to be involved in the Road Safety Strategy's wording around rural roads, despite being one of the groups most at risk on exactly those roads.

The democratic road: More than a metaphor

Dr Santiago Amietta's contribution to the discussion brought a different kind of rigour – the rigour of political theory applied to a domain we usually treat as purely technical. His argument is straightforward but has significant implications: roads are not just infrastructure. They are socially and politically constructed spaces, shaped by design, policy, enforcement and sanction. They reflect choices about who matters, whose time is valuable, whose safety is prioritised.

His definition of a democratic road is one designed and managed so that everyone can move and use it safely and sustainably, and in which everyone has a genuine opportunity to participate in enjoying it, being safe within it, and deciding how it is shaped. By that standard, British roads fall well short.

Power over roads, Amietta argued, sits with a relatively narrow group: national and local authorities controlling funding and design standards; technical experts whose models prioritise traffic flow, speed and efficiency over safety and inclusion; enforcement agencies with substantial discretion over how rules are applied; and, most pervasively, the cultural and political weight of the private motorist, whose convenience has been the organising principle of road design for over a century.

This analysis is not merely academic. The Road Safety Strategy's Safe System framework implicitly acknowledges that roads are constructed environments, and that human error is inevitable. The system should be designed to protect people when mistakes happen, but a Safe System that does not address the distribution of power within it will struggle to achieve genuinely equitable safety outcomes.

Motonormativity: The cultural barrier to democratic roads

One of the most thought-provoking exchanges in the April discussion centred on the concept of motonormativity – the idea that it has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that roads are for cars, that any other use feels like an intrusion, an exception, or an inconvenience.

This is not simply a matter of driver attitude, as one of the audience questions pointed out. It is a societal assumption so pervasive that even people who do not drive often internalise it. In that context, the question of democratic roads becomes a question about cultural change as much as policy change.

Amietta's response was both honest and instructive. He noted that motonormativity is not immutable. Travel elsewhere in Europe and its grip appears visibly weaker. But changing it in the UK requires education, participation and a willingness to challenge the framing of road safety debates that are often dominated by voices whose primary interest is in vehicle flow and journeys by car.

He also raised a concept with direct enforcement implications: windshield bias – the documented tendency to perceive road safety primarily through the lens of the driver, rather than through the experience of those outside the vehicle. Democratic roads require that we don’t fall into this trap.

Participation is not enough if it is not inclusive

One of the most challenging insights in the Project EDWARD discussion came from Amietta's own research. His team, studying road users who submit journey cam footage of driving offences to police, found that their sample – despite efforts to recruit broadly – was disproportionately white, highly educated and above average income.

His conclusion was uncomfortable: the very capacity to identify and report road danger, and to engage with official systems in response to it, appears to be unequally distributed. Those who participat in road safety activities such as attending webinars, submitting footage and engaging with consultations do not fully reflect the diversity present in road use as a whole.

“The very preoccupation with road safety, the very ability to mobilize that preoccupation in some form of participation appears to be almost a privilege. Which is something we need to address because the distribution of harms is disproportionately in the other direction.”

Dr Santiago Amietta

This matters because, as Amietta noted, the distribution of road harm runs in exactly the opposite direction. Lower-income communities are more likely to suffer road harm and the environmental consequences of road infrastructure. Ethnically minoritised people are more likely to live in dense urban environments where exposure to road danger is highest. Older people, children, women cycling and riding all face disproportionate risk, and all are underrepresented in the processes that shape how roads are designed and enforced.

For ARRM members, this is a direct challenge. The road safety community is passionate and expert. But if the voices shaping road safety policy and practice do not reflect the communities most affected by road harm, the gap between strategy and lived experience will persist. The Road Safety Strategy's commitment to supporting vulnerable road users must be matched by a genuine commitment to hearing from them – not through tokenistic consultation, but through sustained, resourced, community-level engagement.

Consistency and empathy: What vulnerable road users actually need

The discussion moved from the conceptual to the very concrete when the conversation turned to what horse riders, cyclists and other vulnerable users actually experience when they try to engage with official systems after an incident.

Alan Hiscox described the inconsistency horse riders encounter when submitting journey cam footage to police. The quality of response varies dramatically between forces. In some areas, footage is reviewed promptly, the rider receives feedback, and action is taken. In others, submissions disappear without acknowledgement. The postcode lottery that affects how road traffic victims receive support, discussed in our previous ARRM thought leadership piece, also affects how road incidents involving vulnerable users are handled.

Amietta's research with Helen Wells on journey cams identified three words that should sit at the centre of police engagement with vulnerable road users: consistency, communication and empathy. These three things, applied reliably, would represent a significant improvement for the thousands of riders, cyclists and other road users who currently feel that reporting an incident is not worth the effort.

The 21 police forces that have participated in close pass operations with the BHS offer a model. Drivers stopped during those operations have included people who genuinely did not realise they had passed dangerously close, and people who were unaware of the 2022 Highway Code changes. Education at the point of enforcement, delivered with empathy, changes attitudes in ways that a fine alone cannot.

Grassroots innovation and the limits of official channels

One of the most striking moments in the April discussion was the story shared by Sharon Hilton of Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership. Faced with local authority restrictions on placing BHS signage on public roads, the partnership worked with horse riders and landowners to display large-format boards carrying the Dead Slow 10 mph and 2-metre message on private land adjacent to roads where horses are regularly ridden.

The result: more than 140 boards distributed across Warwickshire, positive feedback from riders, and a reported reduction in horse-related incidents in the county. Amietta described this as an example of power being fluid, of participation emerging from creativity and from stretching what is possible within official structures. He was right to celebrate it, and equally right to note that it should not remain a workaround. The fact that road safety partnerships must route around official signage rules to warn drivers that horses may be on the road is a symptom of a system that has not kept pace with democratic road use.

The absence of a standard DfT road sign combining a horse warning with explicit guidance on passing safely, equivalent to what exists for pedestrians and cyclists is a small but telling signal of who the system is designed to protect. The Road Safety Strategy's acknowledgement that more needs to be done on Highway Code awareness is welcome, but awareness campaigns without infrastructure, signage and enforcement will not be enough.

What the road safety strategy must deliver for democratic road use

The government's 2026 Road Safety Strategy is built around a Safe System framework and a 65% KSI reduction target by 2035. It is strong on vehicle safety technology, on enforcement of the fatal five, and on data-led infrastructure improvement. But the Project EDWARD discussion highlights a set of commitments that must be embedded in the strategy's implementation if the ambition of democratic road use is to be taken seriously.

First, the strategy must actively include equestrian and other non-motorised users in rural road planning. Horse riders have access to just 22% of rights of way in England. The guidance around active travel infrastructure, including the LTM120 cycling guidance, has in some cases made conditions for horse riders worse, not better. Multi-user routes that accommodate pedestrians, cyclists and equestrians need to be part of the rural roads conversation from the start, not retrofitted as an afterthought.

Second, the strategy must address the consistency gap in how incidents involving vulnerable road users are handled by police. The postcode lottery in Operation Snap responses, in how journey cam footage is reviewed, in FLO deployment for bereaved families, all reflect a system that delivers different standards of protection depending on where you live. We should be working towards ational minimum standards, supported by training in empathy and vulnerable road user experience.

“We need to strengthen partnership working. We've got some really good partners out there. Strengthen it with the government and the police and the local authorities and road safety partnerships.”

Alan Hiscox

Third, the strategy must invest in widening participation in road safety. If the communities most affected by road harm are the least represented in the processes that shape road policy, that is not a coincidence – it is a structural problem. The Road Safety Investigation Branch, whose establishment is one of the strategy's most welcome commitments, should be designed from the outset to engage with the full diversity of road users and affected communities.

Fourth, the Highway Code changes of 2022 need to be backed by a government-led public awareness campaign, not left to charities and road safety partnerships to deliver on limited budgets. The BHS and its partners have done remarkable work, but those that set the rules have a responsibility to communicate them.

A road that works for everyone

There is something quietly radical about the idea of democratic roads. It does not ask for roads to be made less efficient, or for drivers to be treated as the enemy. It asks that the choices embedded in road design, regulation and culture – choices that have historically been made for motorists, largely by motorists – be reopened to the full range of people who use and are affected by public roads.

Alan Hiscox put it simply when he described his ambition to have horse riders considered in the hierarchy of road users at every level,not as an afterthought, but as a matter of course. Amietta's vision is broader but shares the same root: roads as genuinely public goods, where everyone, by age, income, ethnicity, mode of travel, can move safely, participate in decisions, and feel that the space belongs to them.

ARRM and Project EDWARD exist to turn conversations like the one held in April 2026 into practical change. The road safety strategy provides a framework. Whether it delivers a genuinely democratic road will depend on whether the voices of vulnerable users – riders, cyclists, pedestrians, older people, children, lower-income communities – are placed not at the margins of implementation, but at its heart.