Road safety work has often traditionally been seen to focus almost overwhelmingly on casualty reduction through the use of engineering, education and enforcement and through various secondary safety measures. Much of the emphasis is upon getting the vulnerable road users to bear the burden of responsibility for their own safety and through the promotion of secondary safety measures, largely focused on improving safety within vehicles. The aim of this paper is to consider these two approaches and to identify ways in which they might conflict and to what extent they are complementary to each other. The paper considers, in particular, the ways in which these approaches can be applied to one group of road users, child pedestrians, who have been shown in many studies to be especially vulnerable to the risk of involvement in a road accident. The paper considers the ways in which a more traditional casualty reduction approach might affect children, both through the reduction in their likelihood of involvement in an accident and through the ways in which such an approach may impinge upon their freedom and development. The authors consider the ways in which means of reducing danger at its source could also be applied to the same situation and how this could help improve the overall safety benefits achieved. In particular, this latter approach considers the potential implications of a series of community wide interventions and training programmes, drawing upon techniques which are being put into practice by the authors in a new research project aiming to improve child pedestrian safety in Leeds.
Abstract