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Mayer Hillman, John Adams and John Whitelegg's One False Move: A Study of Children's Independent Mobility shows reductions in child road deaths and serious injuries have been achieved, in this country, not by rendering our streets and built environments safer for the un-carred but by effectively barring unaccompanied children from public spaces now surrendered to high volumes of fast moving motorised traffic. Much as rates of child death and serious injury from alligator wrestling have plummeted since social attitudes hardened to the sport: nobody disputes that 'gator wrestling remains highly dangerous, it's just that kids aren't licensed to participate any more.

Hillman et al published in 1990. Since the seventies the Dutch and Danes, in showing how public space can be configured safely to balance the needs of car users and the uncarred, have been catalysts of an impetus, that now has global reach, towards better designed built-environments that prioritise the pedestrian and the cyclist and the public transport user. 

So how has research and exemplary practice shaped Northumberland's 2013 initiative to promote child safety on the roads now the nights are drawing in? Any major infrastructural changes in the pipeline, or proposed extensions to areas of 20mph limits, any investment? Anything structural to tame motor traffic? Or even a campaign urging drivers to take additional care when visibility is poor, perhaps, to drive within the speed limit rather than treat it as a target speed, to drive at a speed enabling them to stop within the distance they can see to be clear, not to force pedestrians and cyclists onto the carriageway by parking on pavements/cycle tracks, not to be updating their Facebook page on a laptop open on the passenger seat when driving past school gates disgorging pupils into the gloaming? None of these things. It's the usual deck-the-soft-targets-in-reflectives solution. Rather than urging car users to volunteer the utmost care and attention to those they otherwise imperil, children – we all - must wrest attention from them with fluorescent clothing: our communities as construction sites. 

My untutored layman's understanding suggests one principle enshrined in Child Protection legislation is that the adult in any given interaction has responsibility for the child. Put the adult in a car and the polarity shifts, the responsibility is now the child's to militate the threat posed to her by the behaviour of the adult. Something's wrong here.

Bio-engineering may be the way forward. It's been done with puppies. Splicing genetic material from bio-luminescent marine creatures into the DNA of future generations will see glowing people co-existing safely with motorised traffic. There'd be an additional benefit to this genetic tweaking: when the lights go out with the impending end of the century-long cheap oil orgy, people will still be able to read after dark by the light of their own fluorescence.

This has depressed me. Let's finish with an up-beat song.