|
Road User Safety and Disadvantage
The Department for Transport today (3 February, 2011) published a report following a three year study undertaken by the Centre for Research in Social Policy in partnership with AECOM.
The overarching finding from this research is that environmental and planning issues and community involvement need to be at the heart of comprehensive cross-government road safety strategy if the numbers of road injuries involving children and young people in disadvantaged areas are to be significantly reduced. This research provides some clear suggestions as to how the inequalities in road injuries in disadvantaged communities might be reduced by:
- Developing and managing the physical environment - this broad area of activity is concerned with managing the high demands on densely populated urban areas; dealing with the legacy of older urban environments not originally designed for cars and giving a higher priority to pedestrians. Suggestions include: taking planning measures to avoid the further intensification of housing and ensuring that developments make provision for public transport or on site access.
- Managing traffic and effective enforcement activity - more effective and visible traffic management and enforcement activities to reduce the volume and speed of traffic in disadvantaged areas and so reduce the risks for child pedestrians. Working with the local community to identify areas of particular risk and determining an appropriate response.
- Changing behaviours and attitudes - the research suggests that future road safety communication activities need to be designed to ensure they use language, imagery and media that make the content relevant to people in disadvantaged areas – and in some cases, their ethnicity/culture as well as age. The application of marketing tools such as MOSAIC can be appropriate for identifying and engaging key groups.
- Integrating road safety into other policy agendas - the research has indicated that there would be considerable value in ensuring that road safety issues are incorporated at a high level within a wide range of organisations so that it becomes entrenched in strategic level planning and policy by organisations and departments outside of those explicitly focussed on local authority road safety.
- Increasing the level of co-ordinated partnership working at an operational level - it would appear that there is scope for more joined up working at an operational level including linkages with the police, fire and rescue and other emergency services, community safety, community .
The full report, Road Safety and Disadvantage (DfT Report 123) by Clare Lowe, Grahame Whitfield, Liz Sutton and Jeremy Hardin is published by the Department for Transport. It can be accessed on-line at: www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/research/rsrr/theme1/roadusersafetyreport/
If you would like to talk to one of the research team about this report, please contact Grahame Whitfield (G.Whitfield@lboro.ac.uk, 01509 223392 or Liz Sutton E.A.Sutton@lboro.ac.uk, 01509 223679).
top
|
