One survey could change how neurodivergent children travel on UK roads

A new neurodivergent road safety project is asking children, young people, parents and professionals what makes everyday journeys harder, with findings set to inform safer travel guidance and future interventions.

A school run can fail long before anyone reaches the kerb.

For some neurodivergent children and young people, the difficult part is not just crossing a road or reading traffic. It can be noise, pace, unpredictability, crowds, waiting, or the split-second decisions a street demands. A new neurodivergent road safety project is now asking families and professionals to spell out what that feels like in practice.

In brief:

• Road Safety GB has shared a call for evidence on safer journeys for neurodivergent children and young people.
• The project is backed by the Road Safety Trust and aims to better understand barriers in everyday travel.
• Children, young people, parents, carers and practitioners are all being invited to take part.

Why neurodivergent road safety needs a closer look

Road safety work often assumes that people will spot hazards, judge speed, filter distractions and respond consistently to signs, signals and other road users. That is tidy on paper. Real streets are less polite. They are noisy, rushed and full of competing information.

That matters because neurodivergence can affect how a person processes sensory input, change, risk and routine. A crossing that seems straightforward to a designer or road safety officer may feel completely different to a child dealing with overwhelm, anxiety or communication barriers. If the aim is a safer journey, the useful question is not just whether a facility meets guidance. It is whether a child can actually use it.

The project highlighted by Road Safety GB aims to better understand those day-to-day experiences. It is inviting evidence from children and young people themselves, as well as parents, carers and professionals who support them. That should widen the lens beyond collision data, which can tell you where something went wrong but rarely explains why a journey felt impossible before any incident happened.

In highways terms, this sits in the awkward gap between formal infrastructure and lived use. Engineers can provide crossings, footways, signing and speed management. Schools and families build routines around them. But the success of a route often depends on human factors that are much harder to see from a drawing or a traffic count. It is the same reason behaviour, visibility and local context keep returning in wider road safety work, whether the issue is a school gate, a town centre crossing or a road marking many drivers misread.

The ask itself is simple: tell the project what makes journeys safer or harder. That may include walking, wheeling, cycling, public transport, car travel or the transitions between them. For practitioners, this is the sort of evidence that can sharpen future education materials, scheme design, crossing layouts and the language used in local engagement.

There is also a more basic point here. Highways schemes often talk about accessibility in terms of gradients, widths, tactile paving or dropped kerbs. Those things matter. They are also only part of the picture. Cognitive accessibility can be less visible, but it changes whether a route is calm enough, legible enough and predictable enough to use without distress.

For local authorities and road safety teams, that can affect far more than a single campaign. If a route to school looks acceptable in technical terms but families still avoid it, the problem may sit in how the environment is experienced rather than how it was intended. That can mean rethinking crossing points, waiting areas, guardrailing, clutter, signal timings or the order in which information is presented. Sometimes the barrier is speed. Sometimes it is sensory overload. Sometimes it is the unpleasant truth that a scheme designed for an average user has quietly excluded plenty of real ones.

The current project will not, on its own, redesign Britain’s roads. What it can do is give road safety practitioners something the sector often lacks: direct evidence about how neurodivergent children and young people experience ordinary trips that everyone else treats as routine. That is useful because routine is where risk hides. Most journeys do not happen on a test track or in a consultation diagram. They happen in drizzle, under time pressure, with bags, siblings, buses, engine noise and somebody saying hurry up.

If the responses are detailed enough, the findings could help shape future guidance and interventions around safer journeys for neurodivergent children and young people. For families, that may sound modest. It is still a meaningful start. Road safety tends to work best when it stops talking in averages and starts asking who the road currently works for, who it does not, and what that feels like at walking pace.