The International Road Federation (IRF) has opened registration for a three-day professional training course on designing urban streets for vulnerable road users, to be held in Doha, Qatar, from 3 to 5 November 2026.
The programme is aimed at road agency executives, engineers, traffic management and road safety professionals, advocates, law enforcement personnel, researchers and academics.
What the course covers
The IRF has structured the programme around a progression from diagnosis to design to evaluation.
Day one focuses on identifying and prioritising risk. It covers how road users interact with infrastructure, how urban streets function in relation to surrounding land use, and the analytical tools available for diagnosis, including traffic conflict analysis, crash analysis, AI applications in safety diagnosis and risk prioritisation. It also introduces the main infrastructure safety management instruments: Road Safety Impact Assessment, Road Safety Audit, Road Safety Inspection, Black Spot Management and the Safe System approach. Pedestrian-specific content follows, covering signalised and unsignalised crossings, refuge islands, traffic calming and access management.
Day two widens the scope to cyclists, motorcyclists, public transport users and other vulnerable groups. Topics include self-explaining roads, designing for safe speeds, street design elements, bus stops, safe intersections and crossings at side roads, alongside direct application of Safe System principles to street design. Case studies and a team exercise on identifying unsafe street features are included.
Day three turns to implementation and measurement, covering tactical urbanism and temporary interventions, and how to evaluate results using baseline data, safety targets, key performance indicators and crash modification factors. Case studies from New York and Dubai are included.
Who is teaching it
The course is led by Tawab Kazemi, who according to the IRF has more than 29 years of experience in transport, traffic and road safety projects and has conducted over a thousand international road safety audits covering roads, public transport, cycling and pedestrian facilities.
He is joined by Dr Eng Wael Alhajyaseen, Associate Research Professor at the Qatar Transportation and Traffic Safety Centre at Qatar University, whose research covers traffic safety, road traffic control and operations, road user behaviour, traffic simulation, virtual reality applications and intelligent transport systems. He also leads the Traffic Safety Professional Training Program, which the IRF says has trained more than 400 senior engineers and practitioners since 2016.
The context behind the programme
The IRF notes that vulnerable road users account for more than 70 percent of road deaths in some countries, and around 30 percent in Qatar.
That framing is consistent with the global picture. According to the World Health Organization’s most recent Global Status Report on Road Safety, <cite index=”12-1″>vulnerable road users make up 53 percent of all road traffic fatalities worldwide: pedestrians account for 23 percent, riders of powered two- and three-wheelers 21 percent, cyclists 6 percent, and users of micromobility devices such as e-scooters the remainder</cite>. <cite index=”12-2″>Global road deaths stand at around 1.19 million a year, down 5 percent since 2010.</cite>
The same report contains the figure that arguably explains why a course like this exists. <cite index=”15-1″>Nearly 80 percent of roads assessed worldwide fail to meet a minimum three-star rating for pedestrian safety, and just 0.2 percent of assessed roads have cycle lanes, even as cyclist fatalities rise.</cite>
Qatar’s roughly 30 percent share of fatalities among vulnerable road users is low by global standards, but the Gulf region’s high-speed arterial road design and rapid urban growth make the design questions the course addresses directly relevant.
Practical details
Dates: 3 to 5 November 2026 Location: Doha, Qatar Format: Three-day in-person course with case studies and an interactive team exercise Registration: Open via the IRF registration portal
Fees were not stated in the announcement. Prospective participants should check the registration page for pricing, cancellation terms and any group or member rates.
