Equestrian road safety: Why the quietest roads carry the highest risk 

A quiet country lane feels like the safe option. The data says the opposite. 

At MICHELIN Mobility Intelligence, we analysed 203,009 driving events recorded on British roads frequented by horses. On quiet rural roads, 42 percent of the dangerous behaviours we detected exceeded the force threshold at which a horse reacts. On major routes, that figure was 18 percent. 

The empty road is not the safe road. And that single finding changes where prevention should be aimed. 

Why intuition gets this one wrong 

On a major route, a driver expects the unexpected. Traffic is dense, speeds are managed, attention is already engaged. A horse and rider register as one hazard among many, and the driver adjusts. 

On a lane with clear sightlines and no traffic, the same driver relaxes. Speed creeps up. The bend arrives faster than expected. And the margin that should protect a horse and rider disappears exactly where the road felt safest. 

This is not a question of attention. It is a question of physics. A horse can trigger its flight response in under half a second. No amount of good intention closes that gap once a vehicle is travelling too fast, too close. The updated Highway Code has been explicit since 2022: pass a horse at no more than 10mph, and leave at least two metres of space. Our data shows how often that guidance is not being followed, and where. 

Those numbers almost certainly understate the problem. The BHS estimates that only around one in ten incidents is ever reported. The official picture is the visible fraction of a much larger pattern, which is precisely why reported statistics alone cannot tell a highway authority where to act.

What driving data reveals that statistics cannot 

Incident reports tell you where something went wrong after the fact. Driving behaviour data tells you where it is about to. 

By analysing real driving events rather than reported collisions, it becomes possible to see the near-misses, the dangerous passes and the excessive speeds that never generate a report but define the actual risk on a stretch of road. That is what surfaces the counterintuitive finding about quiet lanes. It is also what makes the risk legible road by road, rather than county by county. 

The timing sharpens it further. Half of all the dangerous incidents we identified are concentrated within just six hours of the day, at the points where equestrian outings and daily commutes overlap. Risk is not spread evenly across the map or the clock. It concentrates, and concentration is what makes targeted prevention possible. 

This is the shift that matters for road safety stakeholders. A generic awareness campaign asks every driver, everywhere, to behave better. A data-led approach identifies the specific lanes, at the specific hours, where a targeted intervention will change an outcome. The same budget, aimed at the right place, does far more work. 

How MICHELIN Mobility Intelligence supports road safety stakeholders

We bring together multiple complementary data sources to give road safety stakeholders a far more granular picture of risk than incident statistics can provide. By reading observed speeds, driving events and risk zones on the roads horses actually use, we help identify the most dangerous stretches, road by road, and the times of day when exposure peaks. 

That level of precision is what turns data into a concrete lever for prevention. 

Want to understand where equestrian risk concentrates across your network? Contact our team to find out how our studies support road safety stakeholders. 

Sources :

MICHELIN Mobility Intelligence, analysis of 203,009 driving events on British roads frequented by horses. British Horse Society, Dead Slow campaign, 2025 incident statistics. The Highway Code (rules for drivers passing horses, 2022 revision).