Road safety professionals are being encouraged to put themselves forward for an initiative which forms part of efforts in the UK to support Global Road Safety Week 2015.
Road Safety GB is heading an alliance of road safety stakeholders who have come together to support UN Global Road Safety Week (4-10 May 2015).
The focus of the week is child road safety, using the slogan #SaveKidsLives. The UN Road Safety Collaboration campaign is seeking to highlight the plight of children on the world’s roads, and generate action to better ensure their safety.
Plans in the UK include creating opportunities for road safety professionals here to interact with colleagues in other parts of the world.
Honor Byford, chair of Road Safety GB and chair of the UK Global Road Safety Week National Organising Committee, said: “As part of the campaign we are seeking to forge relationships between road safety practitioners here in the UK and their counterparts in other parts of the world.
“The aim is to provide an opportunity for practitioners to learn from each other, and share and discuss the issues and challenges they face in terms of making children safer on the roads and reducing child road casualties.
“To facilitate this, we are establishing a database of UK-based road safety practitioners with specific skills and expertise in child road safety. Within this database we will also highlight practitioners who either come from, or are skilled at working with, specific ethnic groups to enable them to ‘twin’ or ‘partner’ with road safety professionals from similar ethnic groups around the world.”
Road safety professionals who would like to be involved in this project are being asked to complete a brief questionnaire giving details of their experience and expertise. When complete, the database will be published on the Road Safety GB website.
Click here for more information about plans for Global Road Safety Week in the UK, or click here to complete the questionnaire.
Derek:
We do still teach children about the phrases you mention, as well as providing practical pedestrian training to Primary aged children. Pupils at High School receive education on the consequences of poor pedestrian and driver behaviour, as well as giving information/education to drivers and cyclists.
Jan
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The road safety practice when I was at school in the 1950s was taught by responsible parents and teachers alike with simple phrases like: Stop, Look, and Listen – Look right, Look left, Look right again. If all clear, one may cross the road – walk – do not run. Do not cross at bends or junctions where no approved crossing is installed. Do not cross between parked vehicles, and so on.
Nowadays we seem to emphasise the drive towards educating or chastising the mechanised road user in appealing to their attitude to driving, over teaching children how to cross a road safely. Orderly behaviour of children at bus stops and school crossings is noticeable by its absence rather than presence. Is something being missed here?
Derek Reynolds, Salop.
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I think that the #savekidslives is a great initiative because it is a call from kids all over the world for the adults who design and manage our streets and the adults who use our streets to do so in a manner which is far more respectful of children and their needs.
The full declaration may be seen at http://www.savekidslives2015.org/uploads/declaration/20141104_child_declaration_final.pdf
And of course this is not just a 3rd world problem. In our own country it is the action of adults in designing and using roads that frighten so many children off the exercise of their right to independent mobility and too often kill and maime those that do.
Rod King, 20’s Plenty for Us
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