The Autumn road safety conference season is in full swing and this week Steve Ferris and Richard Owen were in Delhi providing presentations on UK experiences and revealing new research results.
Steve’s presentation highlighted the successful Drivestart scheme managed in Berkshire by Agilysis on behalf of five local authorities. He reviewed the collision involvement context for UK young drivers and revealed their pre-intervention attitudes to common safety issues such as drink driving and the use of mobile phones. The presentation then focussed on behavioural models and how these have been used to clearly define the educational experience without using ‘fear appeal’. Most importantly the session finished by revealing the results of the evaluation which demonstrated changes in social norms, vulnerability and behavioural willingness post-interventions.
Richard’s presentation unveiled an exciting new piece of research which is the culmination of years’ of work analysing collision-involvement within different parts of society using the Experian Mosaic socio-demographic classification system. This new approach profiling drink-drivers involved in UK collisions, used data from over 600,000 collisions (nearly 25,000 of which involved drink-driving) which then employed a multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression, utilizing the hierarchical nature of the data (Mosaic Types). Three categories of independent variables were used, road category, crash conditions, and vehicle and driver related variables.
The results showed significant uneven distribution of collisions by Mosaic type, categories, traffic conditions, vehicle types and driver characteristics. The paper will now be prepared for submission in an appropriate transport safety journal for future publication.
The three day event was a great success with plenty of opportunities provided to network with other researchers and practitioners from across the globe.
