Rebecca Morris, communications and partnerships lead at RoadPeace, is calling for more focused efforts to produce safer drivers.

In an article for Road Safety GB, Morris explains that we need to “invest far more time, and money, on getting inside road users’ heads”. It is only by achieving this, that we can really create “meaningful and effective” campaigns.

Encouraging change

Morris works in marketing. But not your normal product or services sales, but in marketing road safety.

“Having worked in road casualty reduction marketing and PR for the last two decades, I’ve become fascinated by the way road users think (or, perhaps more importantly, why they don’t think), and I really wish I’d studied psychology”.

This is all about “How do we get people to take responsibility for their actions in order to change their behaviour on the roads?”

Alongside this comes the question: “Which messages work, and for which road user groups?”.

Learning lessons

As we all know, getting people to actually put into practice what we teach them when it comes to road safety, can be a thankless quest. Whatever coaching methods we use, shock tactics we implement or responses in the classroom we invoke,  how we get drivers and riders to put them into practice on the road is another question.

As Morris says, “we haven’t yet developed that magic campaign that has actually worked”.

In her essay, Morris talks about past experiences, studies and campaigns, and the in built human capacity to adjust the message to a particular circumstance. We are brilliant at self-deception when it suits us or is most convenient. So how do we break this cycle, habit or routine?

A lottery

People seem to have an in-built acceptance of risks and harms from motor vehicles. While they wouldn’t accept these in other areas of their lives, our roads seem to be an avenue of self-deception we are un willing to turn off from. It has been described researchers as  “motonormativity”. ,

“Just because many people currently believe that road crashes are an inevitable part of daily life, it doesn’t mean we should accept their beliefs,” she states.

But it is not all hopeless doom and gloom. Humans have an ‘optimism bias’. It means we are very capable of overestimating the possibility of positive events and under estimating negative ones.

This, Morris believes, is the key to driving forward with progressive and effective road safety campaigns.

“We need to invest far more time, and money, on getting inside road users’ heads on a national level. We really need to get to grips with how road users think and feel, to determine which messages work and which don’t.”

However, with budgets being cut, campaigns scrapped, there is the feel of very real inertia when it comes to road safety. The statistics don’t lie, and with the reduction in road casualty figures plateauing over the last decade, the complacency need to end.

Changing the reality

“What we do know is, in the last 30 years, since RoadPeace was formed:

  • more than 81,000 people have been killed in collisions on Britain’s roads.
  • 1,245,833 people have been seriously injured and
  • Six million people have received a minor injury as a result of a road traffic collision

But if that’s not enough evidence to prove that we MUST no longer accept road deaths and injuries as an inevitable part of UK life, then perhaps let’s look at the financial costs (which I hate to do, because the human cost will always be far greater). Every single fatal collision costs society in the region of a staggering £2.3m.”

You can read her full article here.