Rural road segmentation research

16 March 2023

For many years the Department for Transport have applied a binary rurality categorisation to Britain’s roads, which assigns each police recorded injury collision to either an ‘urban’ or a ‘rural’ road. This study examines the diverse collection of roads presently categorised as ‘rural’, with the goal of proposing a new typological approach which describes rural highways based on road user experience.

The project led by The RAC Foundation is available on the UK Road Safety Knowledge Centre sets out to:

• Assemble data for the highway characteristics of ‘rural roads’ as presently defined.
• Examine how those characteristics could generate more informative definitions.
• Arrange these definitions into a formal taxonomy with reproducible outputs.
• Evaluate the taxonomy and seek stakeholder feedback

The full report can be downloaded here.