Colleagues who are not already aware may be interested to see the report produced from the Symposium organised by Highways England earlier this year on the topic of road safety behaviour. Details and the report can be found at: http://roadsafetyinsight.com/paving-the-way/
I also copy below the Foreword from the report.
Best wishes,
Glenn
Our context is changing. An ageing society; driverless cars; urbanisation; distributed workforce, air quality. These tides of social, economic and technological change force us to think differently; to look beyond our traditional boundaries and see what we can learn from other sectors. This report challenges us to examine the current context and future trends, raising fundamental questions about the maturity of the road sector, our culture of safety and societal views on acceptance of risk to road users. Advances in behavioural sciences demonstrate that we have an increasingly broad mix of interventions, actors and disciplines to apply to societal challenges such as improving health and safety. This is an area where traditionally behavioural approaches have focussed on changing the attitudes and skills of individuals for example the THINK! road safety campaigns. Notwithstanding the success of these, our understanding about how and why people behave as they do is improving all the time. How we use the roads, whether consciously or automatically, is shaped by who we are as individuals, the physical infrastructure and where we fit in society. We need to determine what works in terms of influencing behaviours through social and physical structures as well as influencing individuals. The value of these new behavioural insights and approaches is in their application, in an integrated and holistic way; reinforcing the process of behaviour change and leading to more sustainable behaviours. In this case a 'safe systems' approach. To refresh our approach to delivering a safe, secure and sustainable road system we need to take some time away from our immediate concerns and reframe the challenge in a broader context, explore what we can learn from other domains and apply the latest evidence of what works in behavioural approaches. I hope this report will be a catalyst for:
* more collaboration and smarter ways of working;
* a more outward looking and multi- disciplinary safer systems approach; and
* the development of a robust and accessible evidence-based approach to investment and delivery.
The 2017 Symposium enabled a strategic look at the issues within and beyond the sector, this report challenges us to go on exploring behavioural perspectives on making our roads safer.
Deirdre O'Reilly, Highways England
|