Lianda Barnes

Silver Linings Playbook. What a great book, and quite the film. An emotional roller coaster. Might need to re-watch it again soon. If you’ve not seen it, I can recommend it. But that’s not the point of this article.

I’m here to answer the question: what exactly is a playbook? Why have Transport Scotland launched their ‘Cultural Maturity Playbook’? And what does this mean for motorists?

A playbook originates from American football, where coaches use notebooks to detail strategies for their teams. In business, playbooks can be used to ensure consistency and improve performance.

The ‘Cultural Maturity Playbook’ contains over 40 case studies with the aim of enhancing the progression of ‘Safe System’ culture. In a rather novel approach, Transport Scotland state that the playbook “aims to provide enough structure to allow creativity to flourish, with enough constraint to avoid wasted effort and resource … we don’t want to be rigid. Rather we want to be open to learning about which tools and techniques worked well, which ones need refinement, and some may need revising out altogether!”.

Transport Scotland, headed by George Henry, is focusing on enhancing road safety practices across the country by embedding a ‘Safe System’ approach among those involved in delivering road safety measures. This is part of a broader effort to reduce road traffic injuries and fatalities by promoting a systemic and proactive approach to road safety.
Scotland has set itself the goal of having the best road safety performance in the world by 2030 and an ambitious long-term goal where no one is seriously injured or killed on our roads by 2050. The framework is backed up by a full suite of mode and user specific casualty reduction targets due for delivery by 2030. When I heard Mr Henry speak at Brake’s ‘After the Crash’ conference last month, I was struck by how driven he was to make the changes that most motorists may not want to see - he’s there to make changes and save lives, not maintain the status quo.

Across the country we’re seeing growing confidence from local authorities in enforcing bans on pavement parking. There was initial scepticism that the bans would be unenforceable, or unwelcome, or be perceived as a bit of a cash cow. The reality is that pedestrians, wheelchair and mobility scooter users, or those using children’s prams and buggies, are increasingly able to navigate pavements safely, without coming into conflict with parked or moving vehicles.

Consultations are ongoing in respect of a change to the national speed limit on single carriageway roads from 60 to 50mph. It’s believed that if most of us are given good reason to slow down, it will gradually become the norm and be easier to enforce. The outliers will be, perhaps, peer pressured into compliance (or penally enforced into observing any changes in the law). Slower speeds, it is shown, have reduced injuries and fatalities. The flexibility that the playbook offers means that councils and other organisations involved in delivering road safety measures can try without fear of recrimination. They might not get it right, but they shouldn’t be afraid of failure.

So – whilst a culture playbook will aim to steer organisations into advocating for some less ‘popular’ road safety suggestions, and in turn aims to help motorists make better choices, it is not a prescriptive nor exhaustive policy document. It’s about everyone making better decisions, by making it harder to make the wrong ones. And that should have the added advantage, and is the goal, of reducing overall numbers of road collisions, injuries and fatalities in Scotland. No fatalities on our roads by 2050? Wouldn’t that be a silver lining indeed?

Lianda Barnes is a partner at Digby Brown