Dave Conway - Beijing on the Safe Side

I am very fortunate to be so engaged with road safety work, and I am very proud to mark Road Safety Week 2024, I bring you my latest blog on what I have been up to.

I am always mindful that I have so much enjoyment doing what I do related to a subject that is so tinged with the desperate tragedies, related to the deaths and life-changing injuries that result from road traffic crashes.

I have just returned from a week in Beijing, China, fulfilling my role as the acting chair of ISO TC241, the technical committee responsible for the development and management of the ISO 39000 series of Roads Safety Management standards, at its annual plenary meeting.

We had a very full agenda, and I seemed to have more than my share of presentations to deliver throughout the four days of the meeting.

Perhaps, the most significant development of the meeting was, that this was the last committee meeting with Sweden as the secretariat of ISO TC241.

Over 16 years, Sweden led the work on developing safe systems for safety, in response to a call from the United Nations. They had the original concept for a management system that enables organisations to systemically manage road safety related to the activities of the business.

They drove the work from the front. Sweden has one of the best road safety records in the world and provided the administrative support for the ongoing work since 2008.

The secretariat is responsible for selecting the chair of the committee, and a number of World-renowned experts led the group until 2023 when, sadly, Sweden ran out of people willing to commit the time and effort, and felt it necessary to ask a non-Swede, me, to take the role of acting chair.

I was of course, honoured and delighted, but in hindsight, I consider it lucky that I had just retired from full-time employment, as it is a very significant time commitment!

Very sadly, with Sweden stepping back from the secretariat and the duties being taken over by Korea in the New Year, my days in the post are numbered, and Korea will appoint a new chair.

However, there was plenty to keep me busy at the meeting, and I had a number of objectives that I really wanted to fulfil while I was still chair!

Firstly, I have been fighting to get ISO 39001 to be subject to well-overdue review, as it was published in 2012. The requirement is to have five member countries supporting the motion, and willing to provide experts to engage in the review process.

After failed attempts for the past two years, with the new engagement of Korea, the new secretariat and China, I was finally able to get sufficient countries to exceed the requirements, and the resolution was passed to commence review, once Korea take over.

Secondly, we have been working on a standard ISO 39004, giving guidance to businesses that provide services as online providers such as Uber, Amazon, Just Eat, and Deliveroo. We have worked our way through a variety of working draft documents, and I was delighted that, after a very hard but satisfying Working Group 7 meeting, we were able to bring the document to the Committee Draft stage - ready for the whole committee to review and comment on, and slightly ahead of the programme for development.

Thirdly, Working Group 4, which is responsible for marketing, has been working on producing some start-up guidance for businesses wishing to follow ISO 39001, and ISO 39002. I’m very proud of these. I had a large involvement in the guide for 39002 but was the sole author of the guide for 39001 and wrote it based upon the methodologies that we devised at FM Conway. Both documents were unanimously approved at the meeting, and the resolution passed to publish them as free guidance documents on the ISO Website. Again, FM Conway leads the way!

On the fourth day, as is tradition for these meetings, we support our hosts with a local road safety initiative of their choosing.

They chose to have a seminar with many of their, and other countries’, leading experts giving presentations on the groundbreaking work in their own countries. There were some very significant VIPs in attendance, including the Chinese Minister of Transport. They took the seminar very seriously, so I was delighted to be a participant.

I had the pleasure of being the MC for the entire event, in addition to giving a presentation of the fantastic achievements of FM Conway, from starting the ISO39001 journey in 2013 through to winning the world-renowned Prince Michael of Kent Road Safety Award in 2023.

It’s an easy presentation as I am so proud to have been a part of that journey.

All told, this was a fantastic meeting for me.

I achieved every target that I had set for my time as chair and came away from the meeting with 26 resolutions that will all contribute to the on-going progress of the committee and contribute to real improvements in road safety around the world.

I also had an amazing time!

It has long been an ambition of mine to visit China, but I was always fearful of language and cultural differences.

Our amazing hosts helped with these concerns during the free time we had and took us to see the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, The Forbidden City and, of course, The Great Wall of China.

I like to think of that as the reward for my endeavours, but the real reward is to see reductions in the terrible toll of road crash victims.

The work continues, watch this space!