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Leeds Council formally adopted an ambition to reduce fatalities on the city’s roads to zero by 2040, at a meeting of senior leaders.

Results from a public survey, which were published last week, showed just a quarter of people feel safe using Leeds’ roads. Pedestrians and cyclists are, predictably, more likely to feel unsafe than drivers.

Adopting the ambition means more money is likely to be invested in traffic calming measures and enforcing speed limits over the coming years.

But the council has admitted the ambition will not be achieved without buy-in from the public.

Speaking at a meeting of the council’s executive board, the authority’s chief officer for highways, Gary Bartlett said : “It’s down to all of us – all of our communities and partners to join together and get behind this strategy in various ways.

“Some of it will be physical infrastructure. Some of it will be enforcement. Some of it will be be persuasion, education and training.”

Addressing councillors directly, he added: “It’s down to you in your areas of responsibility and influence to try to persuade people to change their behaviours.

“It requires everybody, not just the highways department to do it, otherwise we’ll fail, because we can’t do this on our own.”

Casualties on the city’s roads have remained at largely the same level since 2013, with the exception of 2020, when lockdowns were in place.

The leader of the Leeds’ Conservative Opposition, Councillor Andrew Carter, claimed the council had been too slow to take action on a number of dangerous roads in previous years.