From Reactive to Proactive: Why Collision Records Only Tell Half the Story | Interview with Dr Jwan Kamla

Dr Jwan Kamla is a Chartered Engineer whose career has been defined by a deep commitment to improving road safety and advancing the highways and transportation sector. A Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (FCIHT), Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (MICE), and Member of the Society of Road Safety Auditors (MSoRSA), she also holds the National Highways Certificate of Competency in Road Safety Auditing. With a BSc, MSc, and PhD in Civil Engineering, she brings more than 22 years of experience across civil, highway, traffic, and road safety engineering. Jwan’s professional journey spans academia, research, the private sector, and the public sector, a breadth of experience that gives her a rare, holistic understanding of how policy, design, operations, and data shape safer transport systems.

What you’ll learn:

• Why near-miss indicators like harsh braking can identify high-risk locations without waiting years for collision records to build up

• The structural barriers that stop authorities adopting proactive data, including budgets, skills, and the lack of national guidance and standards

• Why crash prediction models that look solid on paper can mislead in practice, and what “hidden variables” means for road safety analysis

• What the UK’s national road safety strategy does and doesn’t say about leading indicators and connected vehicle data

• How we could improve procurement processes to enable better data sharing to get richer datasets and better outcomes