Specifying passively safe street furniture to the European Standard EN 12767 Passively safe support structures for roadside equipment [1] potentially eliminates most deaths and serious injuries from impacts with lighting columns, signposts and similar street furniture. Passively safety was a Scandinavian development in the 1980's and 1990's. Norway developed aluminium Lattix signposts and Finland in particular pioneered passively safe lighting columns (see Finra Engineering News 9E [2]) European Standard EN 12767 was first published in 2000 and is a test protocol to evaluate product safety performance in crash tests. Early drafts of the standard were trialled in the 1990's following the Scandinavian development of passively safe street furniture. In the test items of street furniture such as signposts and lighting columns are impacted by a 950kg car and the vehicle behaviour and measured accelerations evaluated against safe limiting values given in the standard. Products meeting EN12767 are very unlikely to cause severe injuries to vehicle occupants in real life crashes. Lattix passively safe signposts were first installed on a new UK trunk road scheme, the A43 Silverstone Bypass in 2002. This was the first major use of a passively safe product in the UK (and still the only product capable of carrying the largest signs). A DMRB standard TA89 Use of Passively Safe Signposts Lighting Columns and Traffic signal Posts To BSEN 1276713] was published in 2004 and updated in 2005. It gave positive guidance on how and where to use passively safe street furniture on trunk roads and greatly encouraged the use of passively safe products.
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