Having done the survey, field photo-investigation and the exchange of personal experience, we decided to conduct Road Safety For All awareness campaign focused on (un)safe behaviors.
We created texts, an educational video, a song, drawings and posters which we spread around the town. Also, we did ''students to students'' traffic signs lessons and first aid trainings. Then, we collected and organized all the materials on our blog, YouTube channel and Instagram account. Finally, we did a presentation of this project in our school and invited teachers and students to join our campaign.
The ideas
We've been working on a project for about 8 weeks. We started with a couple of group meetings during which we went through educational materials from Safety and mobility for all website, and then we did some brainstorming. We decided to conduct the survey based on the official Law on Traffic Safety on Roads and information on traffic accidents provided by the City Institute of Urgent Medical Care. In addition, we did a field photo-investigation and the exchange of personal experience. Having done everything before-mentioned we got the list of the issues we wanted to deal with, and they were all related to risky behaviors in traffic.
After 141 respondents had completed our survey, we found the following conclusions derived from this analysis particularly important for our project:
1) Pedestrians are more inclined to behave irresponsibly in traffic, and are less familiar with the rules and restriction/punishing methods of improper behavior in traffic than drivers. Namely, in addition to the below-mentioned data that do not speak in favor of responsible behavior of pedestrians, it can be mentioned that 30% of them stated that they do not always abide by traffic rules and regulations, and such a response was given by drivers in only about 7% of cases.
2) However, only about half of drivers stated that they have never used headphones / phones while driving, and the same number of pedestrians uses these devices when crossing the street, so the use of mobile phones and headset devices is a prominent high risk behavior among the members of both groups of participants in the traffic.
3) Over 50% of the pedestrians do not respect the light signals.
4) More than 90% of the pedestrians cross the street outside the pedestrian crossing.
5) A large number of respondents (about 60%) are not trained to give first aid.
6) Only 25% of respondents are aware of the number of traffic accidents in the city of Belgrade, and only 24% of them guessed that pedestrians are most affected by traffic accidents. A very small number of respondents (15%) are familiar with the number of people killed in traffic accidents. Therefore, it can be concluded that respondents have no awareness of the high risk of irresponsible behavior in traffic in our city, they do not know that we have a lot of traffic accidents each month.
During the field photo-investigation we detected three problems:
1) Improper parking
2) Improper street crossing
3) Irreverence of traffic signs
Having done the personal experience exchange we decided that some of our work can deal with:
1) Driving over speed limit
2) Taking part in traffic after alcohol consumption
So, as you can see, all above-mention problems are related to unsafe behavior in traffic. In addition, the result of our survey showed that about 30 % of the respondents consider that an awareness raising campaign could improve traffic safety level on our streets. Therefore, we decided to launch that kind of a campaign. Our ideas were numerous, so we divided our group into smaller teams with different tasks and the same goal: Art group, Writers and journalists team, Music group, First aid training team, Traffic signs lesson team, Media Team.
The initiatives
Having identified the issues we wanted to focus our activities on, we divided our class into teams based on students' competences, skills and talents.
1) Art group created drawings and posters representing (un)safe behaviors in traffic.The posters were then spread around the town by other students from our class. We posted 80 posters on about 40 locations (in other schools, libraries, streets, etc.).
2) Writers and journalists wrote texts about consequences of risky behaviors. They also wrote lyrics for our song which we shared via our Youtube channel and blog. Of course, we all shared it with other people by means of links to those online platforms.
3) Music group composed and interpreted the Road safety song based on the lyrics our writers had created.
4) The first aid training team did two workshops with two other classes in our school (about 60 students) in order to teach them how to behave in case of the most common injuries in traffic accidents in Belgrade. The students could practice new skills during this training.
5) The traffic signs lesson team did two lessons to other students (about 60 of them) in our school on the topic of traffic signs. After that, the students could check newly gained knowledge by doing a quiz the traffic signs team created.
6) Media team created a blog, an Instagram profile, a Youtube channel and an educational video about (un)safe behavior. They organized all the materials on before-mentioned online platforms and did the sharing. Our Road safety for all blog is divided into sections with detailed explanation of the process of realization of the project from the beginning, and it includes all of the materials provided by various teams: the survey and its analysis, photos from field photo-investigation, music and educational videos, drawings, posters, texts... Everything is illustrated with pictures. There is also a completed projects section where our last year project can be seen, as well as the Prezi presentation of this one we have just finished. The blog is available in different languages since there is an option that allows translation (at the end of the page). We have gotten a lot of praises for being well-organized and thorough, and we are proud to say that our blog had more than 2700 visualizations in only a couple of days of its existence.
When all the teams finished their tasks, several members of Media team did the final presentation of the project in our school. Teachers and the students who attended the event did a quiz which Media team prepared when the presentation was over, and they were invited to join the campaign in any way they find suitable, because we plan to keep all our platforms active and opened for works of all the enthusiastic students with good ideas about how to emphasize the importance of responsible behavior in traffic. We got great feedback: teachers were interested in cooperation in the future, and we started getting new texts and drawings from students, which will be published on our blog in due time. So, it seems this is just the beginning of our campaign!
