Our campaign has the aim to show people that all road participants are equally responsible for road safety. So we gathered all the data in order to prove that respect on the road really matters.
Tes Idées
Nobody will deny that this project is really necessary for any place where we have transport and pedestrians. Thinking over our town, we were sure that the most important problem in our town is dark streets at night. The streets and roads are rather narrow so it is sometimes dangerous to walk at night and vehicles can pass really close to passers-by. The same situation concerns cyclists who are invisible in the dark.
We collected some data from the road police about Road Accidents and Injuries (including pedestrians, car drivers and cyclists) in Okhtyrka. We have discovered that drivers (40 %), cyclists (33 %) and pedestrians (27 %) are mostly equally involved in accidents. 22 % of all are fatal cases. This number made us think more about road accidents. We also gave questonnaires to pedestrians, cyclists and drivers - 10 people (of different age) of each category. So in general, there were 30 people who were asked directly about their behavior. Everybody should have answered 6 questions (our team had made up before) according to the category: drivers/cyclists/pedestrians. The data showed us that the most disobedient and irresponsible participants are pedestrians. Even some drivers in their interviews mentioned that it's because the drivers can be fined, the cyclists feel responsibility for themselves as the owners of the mode of transport, but there are now laws that allow pedestrians to be fined. They are confident that they can always cross the road where they want, be invisible at night or even be distracted by the earphones. What is more, they set up the drivers. So we made a plan on what to do.
We also did a field research "Okhtyrka at Night" to see how different participants of the road behave in the dark. It was an hour experiment from 9 pm to 10 pm. We discovered that long before darkness all the drivers turn on the headlights. At night there was no car without headlights, too. Pedestrians should have reflective tape so they can be visible by others. But none of the pedestrians we observed that night had any reflective tape. It is especially dangerous in Okhtyrka where the streets and roads are not so wide. Besides there are a lot of streets without traffic lights so pedestrians cross the streets where and when they want.
Tes initiatives
With our research we understood that all the traffic participants in our community don’t respect each other and we decided to make people aware of the road safety problems in Okhtyrka and that all road participants are equally responsible to prevent accidents.
The quarantine affected a lot the progress of our work but nevertheless we tried to achieve some results. We created an online group and we divided the tasks between us.
We created 2 flyers. One of them was addressed to all road users to remind them to follow the rules on the road and respect everyone. The other flyers was targeting pedestrians and cyclists to reinforce the importance of being visible at night. We shared these flyers on the Internet and on the school website and this information was shared further by other citizens of Okhtyrka.
We presented our work and research on the project to the students of our school and other citizens of Okhtyrka. We wanted our peers and people to know why pedestrians are becoming the most irresponsible on the road.
We bought the reflective tape and shared it with pedestrians and cyclists informing them about its importance and where they could get it.
So now after being involved in this project we are totally informed that not only drivers are guilty on the roads – pedestrians and cyclists are also responsible. And we will improve the situation on the road if we respect each other.
The best feedback we got was the wish of our citizens to use the materials they got from us and follow the rules to respect everyone on the road.
