The decade of Action Safety 2011-2020 was officially proclaimed by the United Nations. Its goal is to stabilize and reduce the level of road traffic deaths around the world. It is estimated that 5 millions lives could be saved on the world's roads during the decade. Therefore, we are honored to participate in solving the problem.
The ideas
There are many problems in traffic. When we heard about your project "Your idea, your initiative" we started thinking. Since a lot of ideas appeared at first, we organized brainstorming sessions. And that's how it all started...
While discussing the ideas we came to the conclusion that most of the participants deal with the problems of children and young people in traffic. So we decided to deal with older participants in traffic. Our target group is experienced drivers. The idea is to determine how familiar they are with traffic rules and how familiar they are with the changes in the Law. For that purpose we made a test. The test consists of 18 questions so that the participants don't spend too much time.The questions aren't difficult, most of them with pictures, including two crossroads. We also had the help of the policemen who stopped drivers while we were delivering the tests. We also tested the knowledge of our colleagues, staff from our school and parents during the parental meetings.
Conclusions:
The respondents were divided into 3 groups. The first group consists of randomly chosen people stopped by the police(94 respondents).The second group are teachers.The third group are parents. 177 tests were done with 18 questions. As well as the age of the respondents is concerned, the majority of drivers have above 20 years of driver's experience (80 respondents), next are with the driver's experience between 10 and 19.99 (57 respondents), then between 5 and 9.99 (25 respondents) and in the end drivers with no more than 5 years of driver's experience (15 respondents). After analyzing the results, we reached the following conclusions:
- Achievement on the test depending on the category of respondents. The correctness of the tests is satisfactory, or of the total number of respondents 86% answered the questions correctly. We can also conclude that the teachers were a little bit more successful with 89% of correct answers.
- Of the total number of respondents 80% didn't cause any traffic accidents (142 respondents), while 20% of them did (35 respondents).
- 60% of respondents (106 respondents) know that the new Law of Traffic Safety came out in 2018, but mostly don't know what the most important changes are, while 40% (71 respondents) don't know anything about it.
- Extremely surprising fact is that even 31,25% of respondents didn't know that crossing the full line is forbidden.
- A lot of incorrect answers on the questions 7 and 8 refer to the fact that many respondents don't know passing by rules.
- 51 respondents didn't do the crossroad question 9 correctly which indicates that they don't know passage rules at the intersections.
- The largest number of incorrect answers (62) were on question 12. But that's not worrying because it's more important to know the meaning of the traffic sign than which group it belongs to.
- A lot of people don't know which light goes after red and yellow, because they don't pay attention to it.
The initiatives
After summarizing the results and interviews with the respondents about what they are most interested in and what they are most knowledgeable about in the field of traffic, we made a presentation. The presentation, additionnaly to the answers from the test, includes the most important changes of the new Law of Traffic Safety.
We held a series of lectures to the teachers as well as to the parents.
We organized some workshops as a way of peer to peer education directed to the other students who did not participate in the project. Both parties, the educators and participants were highly motivated and interested. It is our opinion that it was important to raise the students', future drivers', awareness about the importance of recognizing and learning traffic rules. The traffic police, as our partners, were also presented with the results of carried out actions so as the awareness about the major problems in traffic could be raised in the local community whose part we all are. Since it is our wish that more people are acquainted with the results of our project, we have presented the project also at the local TV stations and tried to raise awareness of the importance that all of us should give their contribution to traffic safety. We hope that our help in identifying the problem will help taking further steps and actions to secure traffic safety, and we hope that our dedicated work has made a modest contribution to improving the safety of traffic. The people we interviewed were very interested in checking their knowledge and learning something new. The most important thing is that we reminded them that:
Knowledge knows no age limit!
