Exploring Students’ Understanding of Traffic Artworks in Jordan

Driving consequences in Jordan are becoming a major concern for all Jordanians despite of their age; occupation; socio-economic status. Education is as important as engineering and enforcement to maintain safety and efficiency on our streets. Unsatisfactory levels of traffic knowledge and safety culture is spreading among Jordanians. The knowledge base among students in Jordan universities and schools is explored in this research when administering a questionnaire to more than one hundred students. The subject of the questionnaire is the contents of eight artworks developed by school kids expressing their understandings of traffic and traffic safety issues. The drawings contained more wrong concepts than correct concepts, and less of the interviewed subjects were able to identify the incorrect concepts compared to those who identified correct concepts. University students were more capable to identify incorrect concepts. The topics and the quality of drawings contribute to the variation in responses among students. No clear trend is detected in that regard. This research is setting the ground for future work to examine the knowledge base of traffic issues among Jordanian. The next step is to examine more artworks with control sets who have been subjected to various orientations prior to examination. Keywords: traffic safety, traffic artworks, traffic safety knowledge, traffic safety awareness, students’ traffic safety

Road traffic safety perception in Jordan

In the past 20 years, several safety measures were taken in an attempt to reduce traffic-related fatalities. Although reduction in deaths was occasionally noticed, the sustainability of that trend has never achieved. This study explores Jordan safety profile trying to explain the traffic safety trend. It examines road traffic safety perception of both public community and road specialist. Main turning points that may have contributed in explaining prevailing traffic safety conditions have been collected. A questionnaire is administered to two distinct groups of the Jordanian society (general public and road specialist) with a total of 167 subjects. The subjects were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of a list of safety measures. Results showed that government took effective but not sustainable measures (mainly enforcement and legislative). Other ineffective measures (administrative and engineering) were taken but they were not target oriented. The main focus of interviewed subjects in order to improve traffic safety in Jordan is to establish sustainable engineering measures and improving the vehicle fleet, driver licensing, and testing procedures. As a surprising result, enforcement measures were not considered as desirable as other measures