Resulting from the recent 2017 Highways England Symposium in March, Road Safety Analysis with Highways England have produced a new report titled Paving the Way; putting behaviour change at the heart of a safe system.
The report examines the current context and future trends, raising questions about the maturity of the road sector, the culture
of safety and societal views on acceptance of risk to road users. Advances in behavioural sciences demonstrate that we have an increasingly broad mix of interventions, actors and disciplines to apply to societal challenges such as improving health and safety. This is an area where traditionally behavioural approaches have focused on changing the attitudes and skills of individuals.
Notwithstanding the success of these approaches, the report hypothesizes that our understanding about how and why people behave as they do is improving all the time. How we use the roads, whether consciously or automatically, is shaped by who we are as individuals, the physical infrastructure and where we fit in society. The report arguest that we need to determine what works in terms of influencing behaviours through social and physical structures as well as influencing individuals.
Read the full report HERE.
