Road safety. Is the message too harsh?

Last week I attended the 8th Australian Road Engineering and Maintenance conference in Melbourne. It was a very interesting conference with two different streams: Road Engineering and Road Maintenance. My interest was mainly with the Road Engineering papers and presentations which were mostly about road safety and street/urban design.

There were presentations about new devices that can enhance road safety like the BarrierGuard steel road safety barrier by Boylan Group that was presented in a crash demonstration at Sundown racecourse. 

Mike Dreznes, Executive Vice President of the International Road Federation presented a paper on forgiving highways using some very graphic images of crash victims. I must say that I couldn't keep my eyes in his presentation as these images were too disturbing for me. This is the second time that such images are used at a conference that I attend, in a very short time. Last time at AITPM conference in Sydney Ron Delezio presented crying, his own hard to believe family drama . This was an even more powerful and very emotional presentation. 

I always thought that such harsh images and information campaigns based on them don't have much success influencing people behavior because people tend to disassociate from them. The human brain tends as a protection measure to think that such crashes and injuries will not happen to me because I am different than the person in this campaign. I am younger or older, I don't drive or I don't walk, I have a better car, I don't drive at that time of the day or any other excuse. A colleague from ARRB mentioned that there is research that shows that such messages have a good outcome in some countries like Australia and Ireland but not that good in other countries like England. 

Personally, I prefer a different approach in road safety campaigns. More clever, indirect messages that don't make the viewer turn his/her head the other way. Campaigns like this one for drinking and driving:

or this very clever road side billboard that changes when it's raining.

The use of positive images seems to me a more effective way to promote road safety. Role models for young people like Karl Lagerfeld or Michael Schumacher are used to reach different target audiences hence they take different approaches.

 

But the reality is that unless we start promoting sustainable transport, more safe modes of transport like walking and cycling, road crashes would be high resulting in deaths and serious injuries and bringing much grief to people.