Don’t miss this conversation! iRAP CEO Greg Smith joined Nicolas Miravalls, co-founder and CEO of ORIS on the Sustainable Infrastructure Podcast covering how the Star Rating system works across the whole life of a road, why a 5 per cent fall in global deaths is both small and encouraging, what happens when AI lets agencies rate entire networks, and why giving the tools away is the model that scales.
Background
More than 3,000 people die on the world’s roads every day, and hundreds of thousands more survive with life-changing injuries. Road crashes are the leading cause of death for young people in every country, yet the toll is so familiar that it barely registers as a crisis.
iRAP exists to change that. It is a UK-registered charity that works in 140 countries and gives engineers and road agencies free tools to measure how safe a road really is and plan how to fix it.
CEO Greg Smith is an engineer who started in local government in Sydney, spending as much of his time listening to residents as he did on traffic models. That mix of technical rigour and community connection runs through how he leads iRAP today: one shared methodology, open to everyone, built on the belief that a road’s design decides more about your risk than your own driving does.
Don’t miss this insightful chat covering topics such as:
- Why road safety is a design problem, not a driver problem
- Why the UN target of halving road deaths by 2030 is still worth chasing
- What changes when every road can be Star Rated
- Why one of the most widely used road safety tools is free
- His advice to anyone starting tomorrow
Watch now below on Youtube or catch the conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Greg reflections:
“You can be, you know, the same person driving along in the safest car in the world, obeying all the laws, and the risk that you face death or serious injury changes as you drive along the road, and that’s linked to the road environment.”
“So it’s small (the 5 per cent reduction in global road deaths achieved so far), compared to the 50 per cent that we’ve got to get to, but these things often don’t happen in a linear way.”
“Our moonshot goal internally that we talk about is how do we help star rate every single road in every country every year?”
“Unless companies can make money, out of doing road safety, road safety is never gonna be a thing.”