Towards safer roadside behavior on the school journey through interactive video training

Abstract

Active travel in the form of walking can contribute to recommended levels of daily exercise and is linked to increased health and wellbeing. Promoting active modes for school travel, such as walking, has become commonplace in recent years. In the United Kingdom, Safe Routes to Schools programs demonstrate one method of promoting walking, whilst attempting to ensure the safety of children during their school journey through interventions which include child pedestrian training. The quality of child pedestrian training programs in the United Kingdom has suffered in recent years due to austerity measures and time pressures forcing local authorities to reduce the amount of practical training and increase the amount of less effective, but cheaper, paper-based classroom activities. This paper considers the effectiveness of an interactive video which has been developed as an alternative to these paper-based activities designed to target and improve the crossing behavior of children between parked cars. In an exploratory study targeted at elementary school aged children, significant improvements in certain crossing behaviors were demonstrated as a result of training with the interactive video, indicating its potential to significantly improve the range of resources currently available for use by road safety training 15 professional