National Conference: Influencing road user behaviour

Two presentations covering a codesigned intervention in Birmingham and equestrian and cyclist safety.

Nicola Wass from SoMo delivered a presentation looking at research into seatbelt use amongst Birmingham’s South Asian communities.

The problem – Road casualty figures in East Birmingham were disproportionately high, and interventions that have been effective elsewhere in the city had achieved little impact.

Birmingham City Council thought that young men speeding in high performance cars lay at the heart of the problem. Were they right?

Seatbelts largely considered by the road safety community as a problem that had gone away – not true among Birmingham’s South Asian communities.

Across the country, 8% of car occupants don’t wear a seatbelt – in East Birmingham this figure rises to 38%.

We know the ‘what, where, when, how, and who’ – but without understanding the ‘why’ we are limited in our ability to design an effective solution.

How can we effectively ‘tailor’ when we have no idea what it means to be a South-Asian teenager living in Birmingham?

Over eight weeks 20 young people from south Asian backgrounds shared their lives with us.

Co-design: we created two behaviourally optimised, tailored campaigns

The tailored campaigns performed significantly better than the comparator campaigns (national campaign, regional campaign and the information only campaign) on all measures.

This shows that that the insights we’d uncovered, were relevant to the experience of being a young person more generally.

Those who identified as South-Asian showed a 35% increase in the number of emotions generated from viewing the tailored campaigns.

The ‘proof of concept’ achieved in Birmingham will be developed into a full campaign – part funded by Transport for West Midlands.

Professor David Crundall, Nottingham Trent University, presented evaluation of a video-based intervention designed to improve attitudes towards horse riders and cyclists.

The problem
Vulnerable road users (VRU) are placed in danger by other drivers. This is, in part, due to: a lack of knowledge of the appropriate ways to interact with horses and bicycles; a lack of empathy or connection to these VRU; negative attitudes towards these ‘out groups’ that do not encourage safe on-road interactions.

A possible solution?
Previous campaigns have attempted to induce empathy for out-group members; videos attempt to show the ‘real person’ behind the VRU;

However, there has been little evaluation of attitudinal shift with such campaigns.

Produced two videos of horse riders and two videos of cyclists – showing their everyday lives. Do these videos change the attitudes of other road users? Are these videos likely to change behaviour?

Findings

• Respondents report positive attitudes towards horse riders and cyclists even before the intervention
• They don’t think it changed their opinions (because they think they already have fairly positive attitudes)
• No evidence for implicit bias against our VRUs
• However, watching the videos does improve explicit attitudes relevant to the video (but this is specific to the type of VRU in the video)
• The videos also improve passing distances and passing speeds

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