Transport Planning and Engineering dissertation awarded Voorhees-Large Prize

University of Southampton graduate Lucy Martin has won the Voorhees-Large Prize for investigating correlations between deprivation and road casualties in rural Devon.

Lucy, an Assistant Transport Planning Officer at Devon County Council, becomes only the tenth winner of Brian Large Bursary Fund prize for the best transport Masters dissertation submitted by a UK resident studying at a UK university.

She graduated from an MSc Transport Planning and Engineering degree with distinction in December, having taken on further study to advance her professional development and technical understanding at the council.

Lucy will collect her prize, worth £1,000, at July’s Transport Practitioners’ Meeting’s Awards Dinner in Oxford.

“Each aspect of the English Indices of Multiple Deprivation can be linked to international road casualty studies, yet much UK road safety research focuses on child pedestrians and on urban areas,” she explains. “This creates a need to investigate the rural context where, as Public Health England asserts, deprivation manifests differently.

“In my research I linked Experian’s MOSAIC Public Sector (a geo-demographic database) with the Indices of Multiple Deprivation and five years of Devon County Council’s collision data. Statistical analysis combined with the wealth of information profiled within MOSAIC Public Sector led to the recommendation of adapted road safety interventions for high risk groups.”

Lucy’s findings largely support correlations within literature, demonstrating how significant negative correlations between deprivation and road casualty risk perpetuate in Devon. However, the use of MOSAIC’s more sophisticated analysis also highlighted nuanced pockets of ‘privileged’ casualties, otherwise obscured in the general deprivation trend.

Lucy previously moved to Devon from South Wales to study Geography at the University of Exeter where she developed her interest in the more social aspects of the planning process, an interest first sparked by plans for a controversial multi-use trail in the village where she grew up. She is now working on a variety of transport schemes, while promoting the benefits of geo-demographic understanding when working for the public.

After graduating in the summer of 2016, she began her career at the County Council in the Road Safety team, working on a variety of projects concerned with collision data analysis, and became interested in how socio-economic datasets held by the council’s public health department could become exciting and enlightening tools in the road safety arena.

Her Southampton degree has expanded this knowledge further, covering everything from the fundamentals of modelling and economics, through to the application of software and planning tools using real-life examples from around the world.

“I would like to thank my supervisors at Southampton and colleagues at Devon County Council for their advice and encouragement throughout my Masters studies,” she says. “It is an honour to receive this award, and as road safety and transport planning become increasingly viewed in a public health context I hope to see the many exciting opportunities data sharing presents come to fruition.”