In recent years, NHTSA has begun to place greater emphasis on increasing seat belt use in rural America. This is in large part due to analyses of crash data showing that an inordinately large proportion of fatalities occur on rural roads and seat belt observation data shows that drivers on rural roads wear seat belts less often than drivers in urban areas. NHTSA has been addressing the problem with targeted seat belt programs that focused specifically on rural drivers, such as the Great Lakes Region-Wide Rural Seat Belt Initiative and the Buckle Up in Your Truck Campaign. Other programs tested innovative approaches to increasing seat belt use in States that were largely rural (e.g., Kentucky, North Dakota, Wyoming, Mississippi, Idaho). Each of these initiatives applied NHTSA’s high-visibility enforcement (HVE) model to increase general deterrence among rural drivers by using media campaigns and waves of enforcement to increase the perceived likelihood of receiving a citation for driving unbelted. Independent evaluations showed these programs were often effective at increasing seat belt use, even in States with secondary seat belt laws (Blomberg, Thomas, & Cleven, 2008, 2009). Building on the HVE model, NHTSA awarded separate cooperative agreements to Kansas and Missouri to address low belt use in rural counties in each State. Under these agreements, each State developed an HVE program using countermeasures previously shown to increase seat belt use in rural areas. Each State was also responsible for hiring an independent evaluator to conduct an evaluation of its program. This report summarizes the activities and results of these two demonstration projects intended to increase seat belt use in rural areas of Kansas and Missouri. Although Kansas and Missouri share a border, the two projects were independently conceived and operated. Each State conducted its own media efforts and used different enforcement strategies. The evaluations included measurements of program awareness and observed seat belt use before and after program implementation. Each evaluator also conducted a process evaluation that included collecting information on media and enforcement activities that were part of the program. Dunlap and Associates, Inc., compiled the results of each State’s evaluation to produce this report. Individual appendices present case studies that describe the processes used and outcomes achieved in each State. As appropriate, each appendix describes how the specific State identified traffic safety problems, how the demonstration project related to the State’s Click It or Ticket (CIOT) program, the countermeasures selected for the program, the methods used to evaluate the program, and the evaluation results. The following sections provide brief summaries of the information found in the appendix for each State. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting