Every person has emotions, which provide us fullness of characteristics. However, big emotional fluctuations make us radical and cause ROAD RAGE, which is one of the main and common causes of traffic accidents. To remit this situation in our city, we took a series of actions to tell others: No rude but rules!
The ideas
Firstly, we, the Shenzhen Senior High School 11th IB class students, had a brainstorming meeting in wechat group (since that period was the peak of corona virus in China so people couldn’t go outside to meet others) and we discussed our ideas about the planning schedule.
We searched some relevant data and information about the accidents and road safety from the Internet such as the speed and the extent of crowding of city cars and the causes of high mortality in traffic accidents. Then we had a meeting and finally decided our topic: road rage.
Then, to learn about people’s opinions toward the main causes of accidents and how they perceive and manage road rage, we made a questionnaire that we shared with our teachers, parents and their friends, to collect answers of people with driving experience. Per the data we got from questionnaire and Internet, we found that the risky behaviors of drivers are considered as the main cause of traffic accidents. Our results of this research were used for one of our initiatives.
The initiatives
With our slogan “No rude but rules” we divided ourselves into three small groups to make a poster, a road design and mathematical model to raise awareness on road rage and its harmful impact on road safety.
Initiative 1 - Poster
We created the main poster to give advice to drivers. Regarding our posters, the members of our group have expressed great satisfaction. However, the process of creating this poster faced twists and turns. Initially we had three different versions and finally got the final one after many revisions and discussions. We wanted our poster to be lively and attractive to the audience but also it had to highlight the message of our campaign. In the process of making posters, we deeply learned the power of teamwork and brainstorming as well as how to highlight the central idea with simple pictures.
Initiative 2 – Mathematical Model Research
As every city blooms and roads expand faster and further than ever before, more and more drivers emerge, so there are more car accidents. Many complicated factors would lead to a car accident, but we aimed to investigate the portion of the road rage of drivers via a mathematical and statistical exploration. We used our questionnaires about real-life circumstances of driving to have a better understanding of:
- Emotions and actions when experiencing road rage
- Frequency of road rage
- Reasons for road rage
Our sample of surveyed people was made of 55 Shenzhen citizens with driving experience. We analyzed the data statistically. The result showed that emotions and actions caused by road rage are harmful and may be causes of car accidents. Also, the frequency of road rage is medium: people in Shenzhen will sometimes get outrageous when driving. Moreover, bad driving patterns are the main reason for road rage. Using the 99% confidence interval for the mean, we estimated that about 2.4% to 4.9% of car accidents were caused by road rage, which deserves more attention and awareness among citizens.
Initiative 3 – Road Design
We got some ideas about road design as well. We divided this action into two parts: improving visual perception (subjective) and measurements to improve city roads (objective). In addition to dangerous driving patterns, emotional fluctuation is another probable cause of road rage. Improving the visual perception of the open road makes drivers feel more secure and controllable to the environment while driving and decreases frequency and the possibility of road rage and induced accidents. People would be more willing to choose to drive on bridges with numerous lanes instead of the ones with single lanes because they make you feel more relieved and less confined on that bridge. We search information from the Internet and collected the opinions of people online to make sure the measurements could work and we made a bridge model to demonstrate.
We organized our work and showed them to the public. We shared our poster and work on our school's bulletin board. We wrote an article with our finding and suggestions on how to avoid road rage and we disseminated online in Wechat groups and made a explaining video to help people understand on YouTube. We did some interviews to know people’s opinion about our project in our school. About 50 people gave us feedbacks face-to-face or online. Most of them are in our school or people around us such as neighbors and friends in wechat. Most of them thought our poster make them pay more attention on road rage and our further research is convincing.
Here's part of them:
"The research about road rage is really close to our real lives and the research data are also collected from people around you, so I think it really reflects the situation around us."
"My parents usually have road rage but I never succeeded in persuading them. However, your research gave me hope and I think they will accept your ideas. THX!"
