Global research shows overwhelmingly that asking people to drive safely is an expensive waste of time, says the car review website dogandlemon.com.
Editor Clive Matthew-Wilson, who is an outspoken road safety campaigner, was responding to an NZTA campaign aimed at reducing drugged driving through warning drivers about the risks they face.
“Campaigns that ask drivers to consider the consequences of their actions have been tried and failed for a century. There are no ifs or buts about it. As with all attempts to change drug-fuelled behavior through publicity campaigns, it simply doesn’t work.”
The American Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, one of the most respected road safety establishments in the world, collated the results of dozens of other studies over the previous 30 years.
Their conclusion: “Research indicates that education has no effect, or only a very limited effect, on habits like staying within speed limits, heeding stop signs, and using safety belts.”
“[Until you check out the facts,] who can argue against the benefits of education or training?” asked Institute chief scientist at the time, Allan Williams. “But when good scientific evaluations are undertaken, most of the driver improvement programmes based on education or persuasion alone are found not to work.”
Williams adds. “At one level all drivers know, for example, that it’s wrong to ignore stop signs and run red lights. Yet these obviously unsafe behaviours occur routinely. They’re leading causes of crashes.”
“Another example is that by now all motorists know that driving after consuming significant amounts of alcohol increases crash risk, but millions of trips are taken each year by seriously impaired drivers.”
The same applies to campaigns aimed at reducing drug consumption through education.
Virtually all studies have shown that anti-drug abuse efforts, such as the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program (DARE), don’t work.
Matthew-Wilson adds:
“High risk groups typically ignore speed signs, speed cameras and road safety messages. The problem with funding campaigns that don’t work is that they rob funds from campaigns that do work.”
Keep it simple
Matthew-Wilson says the key to lowering the road toll is simple:
“Improve the roads, improve the cars, move longhaul road freight from trucks to rail, make it harder to get a motorbike licence and re-target enforcement to high risk groups, such as impaired and reckless drivers, drivers using cellphones and vehicle occupants who are not wearing seatbelts.”
“Just before New Zealand's road toll started falling in the late 1980s, the Auckland harbour bridge used to often suffer one serious accident a week.”1
“Multiple attempts were made to improve the standard of driving on the harbour bridge, and they all failed. Eventually the authorities built a concrete barrier between the opposing lanes of traffic, and the serious accidents virtually stopped overnight. There wasn’t one less idiot on the road, but the road was changed in a way that prevented simple mistakes from becoming fatalities.”
