Campaigns are one of the most widely-used tools to promote and improve road safety, and are an important component of road safety strategies in jurisdictions around the world. These initiatives have long been used as a means to increase awareness of traffic laws and new legislation, safe driving practices, as well as to educate the public about issues related to road safety. The popularity of campaigns may be a result of the fact that they are scalable in size and can be used for a period of weeks, months or years in either an intermittent or sustained fashion. Campaigns can also be tailored to different audiences, and are easily adapted to various road safety priorities. They often combine media-related advertising and education with increased enforcement efforts of some kind, although this is not always the case. Recently, with the advent of social media marketing and new technologies, road safety campaigns have also begun to incorporate new approaches to raising awareness and communicating messages. For these reasons, campaigns appeal to a variety of audiences and can be used to satisfy various objectives related to road safety. Despite the wide variation across campaigns, many of them are designed to achieve one or more key goals. In the Manual for Designing, Implementing and Evaluating Road Safety Communication Campaigns, Delhomme et al. (2009) identify five main goals of road safety campaigns which include: * providing information about new or modified laws (e.g., new penalties for provincial territorial offences with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .05); * improving knowledge and/or awareness of new in-vehicle systems, risk, and appropriate preventative behaviours (winter tires, crash risk, wearing a seatbelt) * changing underlying factors known to influence road-user behaviour (e.g., emphasizing that most people do not drink and drive; perceptions about speeding); * modifying problem behaviours or maintaining safety-conscious behaviours (e.g., challenging misperceptions that it is safe to use the phone while driving); and, * decreasing the frequency and severity of crashes (e.g., lower speeds reduce risk of injury). Furthermore, the effectiveness of road safety campaigns hinges on several factors, including: * the types of tools used in the campaign (e.g., posters, TV, radio, social media); * program duration (e.g., weeks, months, years); * social norms underlying the target audience (e.g., perceptions about the acceptability of a behaviour); and, * the external influences and environment in which the issue takes place (e.g., barriers to the behaviour, social control mechanisms, features of the road). Effective campaigns are more frequently built upon recognized psycho-social and educational theoretical foundations which are used to guide program development and increase understanding of the factors that contribute to the issue at hand. Although there have been many successful national and provincial road safety campaigns implemented over the past several decades, these initiatives have been more limited and challenging to deliver in a local context. This may be due to the fact that national and provincial campaigns can be difficult to adapt at a community level. Indeed, the nuances and facets of issues in individual communities may be different from those identified at national or provincial levels. Hence, communities may find that the design or messages of a campaign are not relevant to their community, particularly if the driving force behind a problematic behaviour is a function of local attitudes, perceptions, or experiences which are not addressed by the campaign. There may also be specific community features that are not acknowledged as part of existing campaigns such as rural road issues, or local types of wildlife that are involved in collisions with vehicles. As a consequence, communities may prefer to design a new campaign from scratch, although they rarely have access to the same resources or expertise that are available as part of larger campaigns. For this reason, the Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF), with funding from the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA), undertook to develop a community-based toolkit for road safety campaigns. It is designed to assist local communities by guiding and informing the development and implementation of an effective road safety campaign. The first phase of this project involved a systematic review of relevant sources and studies to identify relevant theories that provide a foundation for campaigns, as well as research related to the effectiveness of road safety campaigns. These resources included peer-reviewed journal articles, search engines, conference proceedings, as well as publications from both government and non-governmental traffic safety organizations. The search parameters included any and all publications and evaluations from existing or discontinued road safety campaigns from 1970 onward, refined using keyword searches (e.g., “campaign”, “marketing”, “communication”) to further focus this review. From this, a comprehensive synthesis of relevant resources was reviewed and is summarized within this report. This report, a key feature of the toolkit, provides local governments and community partners with an overview of some of the leading theoretical foundations that guide the development of road safety campaigns, combined with a comprehensive summary of the research on road safety campaigns. This report also integrates findings emerging from important education-based learning theories and frameworks to help strengthen the development of effective road safety campaigns. Finally, the report shares recommendations and best practices drawn from existing research and experience in the road safety field that can be considered during the development of community-based road safety campaigns. (Author/publisher)
Abstract