ABSTRACT
The central concern of this paper is with achieving more effective public communications about mobility safety and awareness, where we suggest the road safety field might borrow some tactics public health campaigns have successfully employed for specially targeted audiences. Public health and road safety are crucial issues for agencies concerned with management of risk in populations, and their public campaigns share some general goals, including providing information or education to encourage safe and responsible behaviour. Health campaigns have over a century of experience in a variety of media and can boast many successful large-scale, whole population initiatives (for example on influenza, tuberculosis, polio, childhood inoculations, smoking, skin cancer), as well as numerous smaller scale campaigns targeting specific groups (eg injecting drug users, HIV-risk subpopulations). Road safety campaigns, with a slightly shorter history, have also achieved some major successes, most notably in Australia in seat-belt wearing, and significantly reducing numbers of drink drivers. These gains were achieved through large-scale public education campaigns, legislative changes and substantial police enforcement, backed by small-scale local initiatives co-ordinated through networks of local and regional Road Safety Officers. Current concerns include further reducing road trauma associated with speed and driver fatigue; the continued over-representation of young people – especially seventeen to twenty-five-year-old males – in crash statistics; and growing worries over the number of drug-affected drivers.
