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. 

Texting while driving. OMG not LOL!

While I was driving to get to a site inspection today I stopped at a  intersection with traffic lights. When I turned my head to my right, I noticed that all three vehicle drivers waiting at the lights at the lane next to me where texting. Heads down looking at their mobile phone which they were all holding with both their hands were clearly typing SMS text messages or using any other keyboard related application. Especially with the new smart phones there is a big number of very popular mobile phone applications like email, internet browsers, facebook, twitter, etch that you can use. 

http://wordproverb.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/texting-while-driving.html

I was puzzled at first that all three drivers were doing the same thing. I thought that it was a rare coincidence and it had to do with the traffic lights. Stopping on a red light may make people thing that they have the time to send a quick message or check if that email they have been waiting has come through. But then when the signals turned to green at least two of them that I managed to follow as we were driving parallel at the same direction kept the mobile phone on their hand and were driving with the other. One of them kept typing and occasionally looking at his phone. 

http://www.intomobile.com/2010/07/02/michigan-bans-texting-while-driving/

This is outrageous. People buy smart phones but they are not so smart themselves. Texting while driving is not only illegal in Queensland (300$ fine and 3 demerit points) and whole of Australia but is also considered more dangerous than drunk driving. Driver distraction and inattention have a detrimental impact on road safety.

http://www.themotorreport.com.au/38509/texting-while-driving-increases-crash-risk-by-23-times-study

And while numerous road safety campaigns focus on this issue, the numbers of drivers texting while driving increase. Even though that last year stories of drivers’crashing while texting messages like "I need to quit texting, because I could die in a car accident" made the news. Different solutions with the help of technology were proposed, such as mobile phone deactivation or voice control texting. 

But the question still remains: Do we need someone else to take care of us? Why can't we just do the right thing and don’t use the mobile phone while we are driving?  Why do we prefer OMG rather than LOL?