We are the Shangde Road Safety pioneers. This year we mainly focus on two aspects -- Traffic Congestion around Campus and Misuse of Cellphones on Roads.
The ideas
Advancing technology and booming economy nowadays have brought to the limelight issues of road safety. In our project, we divide the issues of road safety into two parts: local dimension and international dimension. First, for local dimension, we focus on road congestion around our school. Our group wants to propose some feasible solutions to alleviate road congestion. Second, for international dimension, more and more people misuse cellphones while driving or walking, causing an increasing number of traffic accidents, so our group wants to raise the awareness of the pedestrians and drivers about the above issues.
Local Dimension - Traffic Congestion around Campus
In the course of our project, we found that road safety is closely related to our lives and everyone can perceive problems such as congestion around our school. Unruly acts of many parents, students, and even teachers, such as jaywalking, random pull over and so on, lead to the traffic jams around Shangde Experimental School every morning. At the same time, traffic congestion affects the life of nearby residents. Therefore, we first decided the scope of the road that we need to investigate and we used unmanned aerial vehicle(drone) to observe all the roads near the school. Through investigation, we found that Xiu Yan road, Yue Jin road and Luo Shan road are the most congested roads during peak hours (7:20-7:35 on weekdays).
International Dimension - Misuse of Cellphones on Roads
Data from reliable sources indicate that from 2012 to 2017, 10.56% of traffic accidents have been caused by inappropriate uses of mobile phones on the road. Many of the members of our team also have had the experience of being nearly hit by poles or cars as they are looking at their phones on the road. Acknowledging this situation, we are aiming to focus on this inappropriate use of mobile phones safety problem.
We aim to improve the awareness of the detriments of using phones during walking or driving. On the basis of improving the awareness; we hope the project can also decrease phenomenon of using phones during walking or driving. Therefore, we conducted a survey online. Within 5 days, we received 405 responses, and it turned out that 50.21% of people had already realized that looking at mobiles while walking or driving is life-threatening, and 21.54% of people acknowledged that this kind of inappropriate use of mobile phones is illegal. However, it is shocking to find out that 70.72% of people in the survey had the experience of looking at mobile phones when walking or driving on the road. Therefore, we were able to confirm the problem and decided to make a change. And we start from the community near our school. This kind of inappropriate actions of using mobile phones is not only a kind of lacking of respect for others’ safeties but also a kind of irresponsible actions of their own safeties. Roads are many but paramount should be safety. Glances at screens and loved ones cry with tears.
The initiatives
Local Dimension-Traffic Congestion around Campus
We adopted a combination of online and offline approaches to raise people's awareness of the “traffic congestion”.
After collecting the photos and videos recorded by our drone, we started to edit the video and made a stop motion animation. We shared the video and the animation on social media to raise the awareness of the unruly situation, in order to call for attention especially from the officials. Furthermore we wrote an article about the overall issue and posted it on SavorSSES(official WeChat account of our school) to call for attention from students, parents and teachers.
For offline approaches, we used photos, videos and a hand-made model to make a final presentation about our program. We called on students and parents to our school to attend the presentation and we suggested three feasible solutions – change the route to go to school; sending students to school at separate times to split the traffic flow; and changing of means of transportation.
International Dimension-Misuse of Cellphones on Roads
We adopted a combination of online and offline approaches to raise people's awareness of the “mobile phone problem”.
In our meeting, we decided to focus on the main roads near our school first, centering on the passerby, as the problem is more likely to happen in a dense-population region, like the main roads near our school. With online and offline activities, we could then enlarge the scale to the community, and other districts in Shanghai.
Based on the questionnaire, we found out that designing road signs would be one of the effective ways to raise people’s awareness. Hence, we designed the colorful and eye-catching road signs and our group members volunteered to remind the passerby of the danger of misusing cellphones on the road.
When carrying out our plans, we found that in order to deliver the food as soon as possible, delivery man would text or even call their clients while driving motorcycles. Aiming at this phenomenon, we wrote letters to the companies called Mei Tuan and E Le Me which are the two biggest delivery companies in China to raise their attention on these risky actions of their employees.
In order to avoid tragedies, we decided to make a cartoon, which highlights the detrimental results of inappropriate use of mobile phones and give examples of possible accidents, to raise people’s awareness about this particular issue. We planned to use this kind of interesting and story-telling method to evoke attentions of the public and raise awareness of risks of misuse of mobile phones.
To share our ideas to as many people as possible, we made good use of social media, such as Weibo, Bilibili, etc., which are the most popular social platforms in China. Until now, we have received 14.2K views on Weibo. Also, we have got 139 likes, 120 reposts, and 169 comments on Weibo.
What’s more, we wanted to gain more feedback from our classmates, teachers and parents, so we decided to share with more people. We organised an exhibition at school to present our achievements to the students and we got a lot of valuable suggestions from students, teachers and parents.
