A More Effective Road Safety Initiative?
Fatigue Zone Driver Safety Trivia Games?
This morning I drove North from Brisbane, QLD toward Bundaberg. About 2.5hours out of Brisbane and just before Maryborough, I started noticing the signs pictured above. They are placed every 5km or so and ask various questions about local history, geography and native animals, with the answer a further 5km down the track. It kept me occupied for a while – I now know what a monotreme is and what is QLD’s coldest town!
What do you think about the method and effectiveness of this initiative?
Are they more effective than some of the other road safety initiatives we have seen. These have included tactics such as Scare Tactics, Walls of Shame, Road Safety Slogans, Fear, Suffering and Heart Wrenching Videos, Statistics Boards, Social Inadequacy, Car Wreck Displays etc etc
Some Recent Articles on Road Safety:
Rob Long wrote this article 2 years ago: Who’s The Bloody Idiot in response to the bloody idiot campaign: With an abundance of research on the psychology of goals and the psychology of pitching, framing and priming it is surprising that TAC Victoria believe that simplistic insults are a good strategy in safety. Yet when one looks at the statistics on the TAC website (http://www.tac.vic.gov.au/road-safety/statistics/road-toll-year-to-date ), on current trends, Victoria is due for a record high road fatality rate for 2013 (currently 156/8 = 19.5 per month). If the trend for 2013 continues Victoria will have its highest fatality rate in 5 years. If this is so, wouldn’t one question the success of a longitudinal program to simplistically insult people as a strategy in safety. Why don’t TAC Vic just get with it and go for zero? Just think how inspirational that would be for road safety, not.
Rob also criticised this projection and approach to road safety in the article The Ethics Of Safety in which he said: We see this often in the way safety people make choices to ‘save others from themselves’. It is strange that safety people seem delighted to override the self determination of others but don’t like when it is foisted on themselves. The assumption of this ethic is that all others are stupid, irresponsible and ignorant. Such an ethic has no notion of competing goals, psychology of risk or heuristics. This ethic is evident in the Victorian TAC road safety campaign where this week they have gone to new heights in Melbourne in insulting the public, soon the poster will come out that everyone is a friend of a bloody idiot, indeed we are all bloody idiots except the Victorian TAC.
Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below