Adelaide, South Australia: Mass media route to safer roads

The Centre for Automotive Safety Research at the University of Adelaide has published a review of best practice in the use of mass media to promote safer behaviours on the highway. This literature review updates that undertaken in 2001 as a component of the South Australian Road Safety Media Evaluation Study.

Australian and international road safety mass media literature published from 2001 to 2009 was reviewed to determine best practice for mass media campaigns in South Australia. Public health literature was also examined but the primary focus was on road safety.

Rather than concentrating on whether road safety advertising is effective or not, this review focused on what elements of road safety advertising are more effective and for which road user groups.
The review specifically focused on:

The report states that there is general agreement that the most effective health-related mass media campaigns use well researched psychological theories of behaviour change to develop the campaign. Theory can provide a conceptual foundation for a campaign, assist in determining where campaign messages might focus, and accommodate evaluation of the campaign. A number of psychological theories that concentrate on predicting behaviour change, explaining social persuasion and the process of behaviour change are described. Despite the known benefits, few campaigns use a theoretical framework when designing campaigns.

In so far as campaign design and development is concerned the study records best practice as being:

Despite much research, the literature examining the effectiveness of threat appeals is inconclusive. There are some suggestions that fear appeals can have an impact but only when specific conditions are satisfied. The fear appeal must describe a threat (i.e. severity, personal relevance, vulnerability) and suggest a specific plan for reducing or avoiding the threat (e.g. a safe behaviour) that is possible to carry out, perceived as effective, and allows the target audience to believe that they are capable of performing the safe behaviour.

This literature review leads the authors to conclude that a campaign may be counterproductive when individuals may believe that they are unable to protect themselves from the threat, resulting in defensive and maladaptive responses. On this basis, fear appeals should be used with caution and road safety campaign developers should consider using different appeals.

The study points out that gender may influence the effectiveness of different emotional appeals. There is some evidence suggesting that positive emotional appeals (e.g. humorous) may be more persuasive for males than fear appeals and vice versa for females.

In so far as exposure to advertising is concerned, industry standards suggest three exposures are needed to achieve minimum effective frequency although there are suggestions that a single exposure might be enough in some situations. In the absence of any new knowledge from road safety campaigns, this study recommended that industry standards should not be exceeded.

Evaluation needs to be set against realistic expectations and take account of:

A review of evaluated road safety mass media campaigns in the published literature examined 14 studies. Due to the lack of scientific evaluations, generally poor methodological designs, confounding factors, and lack of documentation of campaign activities, it was difficult to determine what elements of the road safety mass media campaigns were effective. Nevertheless, some comments were made concerning the improvement of media campaign design and evaluation that highlighted previous findings from the literature.

The full study can be found at: http://casr.adelaide.edu.au/casrpubfile/972/CASR074.pdf

Australia: ITS for safer level crossings project under way

Australia’s CRC for Rail Innovation is moving ahead with the “ITS for safer level crossings” project; or, to give the full title “Integrating driver and traffic simulation to assess in-vehicle and road-based level crossing safety interventions”. The three year study is being led by Andry Rakotonirainy ‐ Centre for Accident Research Road Safety at the Queensland University of Technology reporting to a steering group chaired by Terry Spicer of the Victoria Department of Transport.

Level crossing crashes have been shown to result in enormous human and financial costs to society. According to the Australian Transport Safety Board, there were 578 road vehicle collisions at railway level crossings from the January 1st, 2001 until June 30th, 2008. The Australasian Railway Association (ARA) has presented figures showing that since April 2006 there have been 14 major level crossing crashes involving trucks with the loss of 17 lives and more than AU$100m in damage. Most analyses have demonstrated that errors or violations
on the part of the road user are the largest contributor to level crossing crashes, indicating the urgent need for innovative road‐based interventions to complement railway interventions. This is important as level crossings are the single greatest source of risk to safety on the Australian rail network.

Level crossings are the interface between two infrastructures, rail and road. Crashes that occur in level crossing are mainly fatal and the overall objectives of this project is to prevent them by designing a new Intelligent Transport System (ITS) intervention that will reduce unwanted risky situations. Specifically, the approach taken by this project is to trial new Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) interventions in the new CARRS‐Q driving simulator to:

The outcomes of this project will be

This project addresses two of the top four priorities identified during the
Rail CRC workshop on New Approaches to Understanding and Preventing Level Crossing Incidents held in February 2009. These two priorities are:

This project is expected to deliver valuable research, knowledge and innovation to the railway industry and its stakeholders, using a state of the art driving simulator.

A recent estimate of the cost of level crossing crashes involving motor vehicles is about AU$50m per year. According to the ARA, the industry‐wide benefit of deploying ITS interventions is estimated at a 10% reduction in collisions. The successful completion of this project and identification of low-cost technologies for level crossing protection systems will reduce the occurrence and severity of crashes which would in turn reduce their associated cost and negative impacts on the economy in terms of value of loss of life, lost productivity, delays etc. This in turn will create opportunities for different industries to be involved in the development and implementation of the recommended technologies with increased potential for export and benefits to the Australian economy. Furthermore the driving scenario developed in this project can be re‐used for driver training on level crossings for truck drivers to increase their awareness and therefore change their behaviour.

The policy outcomes from this project are intended to provide road and rail authorities with information on means to achieve greater co-ordination on the use of ITS to improve level crossing safety than has been the case in the past. This should lead to further improvements and a reduction in risk for railway crossing safety to the general public when encountering level crossings.

(April 20th, 2010)