New opportunities for road safety behaviour change.
Our response to Covid-19 has focussed on health and economic concerns. As the conversation turns to easing restrictions, these two factors will again guide decision making. One area where the same clarity of thinking is needed, and that already carries major health and economic costs for our community, is road safety.
The way we have lived our lives in recent weeks has been very different. While we’ve been hibernating, and the Earth has been healing itself, our interactions with the roads have potentially decreased or changed. I can’t remember a time when Australians will have driven so little, and for so long. Footage of city centres around the world has shown normally congested streets bereft of traffic – something many of us may have previously wished for during peak hour frustration.
But what will happen when motorists – and pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists – return to the roads?
After being in isolation for so long, people will be desperate to get out. With domestic flights returning to normal still months away, and international even longer, Australia is set for a tourism boom; enter road trippers and grey nomads. L plate drivers will be keen to get their hours up quickly to make up for lost time, and P plate drivers will be wanting to get out and enjoy the freedom they’ve missed. Taxi and Uber drivers will have increased demand when restrictions on gatherings are eased and restaurants and bars start re-opening. Working from home will undoubtedly continue at increased levels, but those who do go to work may be more apprehensive to take public transport, so we’re likely to see more cyclists and pedestrians, as well as cars. All this, in the face of an increased freight task working around the clock to manage unprecedented online demand. The quieter roads are set to be utilised differently and with an influx.
It is bound to be a melting pot of changed behaviours. Will the pedestrians I’ve noticed walking between parked cars and onto an empty street to avoid others on the footpath absent-mindedly continue this social-distancing habit?
And what about drivers? Sure, we’re not going to have forgotten how to drive, but many of us will be ‘rusty’. And it’s going to be a challenge to snap back into what were automatic behaviours, like checking mirrors before changing lanes or clicking in the seatbelt when we enter a vehicle. Could we expect there might be words uttered like “I totally forgot” or “I wasn’t thinking?”
Research suggests it can take as little as 18 days to form a new habit and, as we turn the calendar to May, we’re approaching 50 days since national restrictions were introduced. While loss of skill varies depending on the type of skill, not practising a skill decreases our ability to perform it. The longer the delay, the more the decline. That’s why commercial pilots require ‘recency’ before being able to fly.
Which leads me to distraction. A distracted driver has 4 times the risk of crashing, and when a driver’s eyes are off the road for 2 seconds when driving at just 50kmh, they’re travelling ‘blind’ for up to 28 metres. How might distraction play out in response to the reduction of road use in our lives? We’ve become used to working remotely, so will likely be less ‘switched on’ during the drive to the office. Or will younger people who have been connecting via their mobile phones even more than usual continue this when driving? And what about vulnerable road users who have become used to fewer obstructions?
The ongoing effects of Covid-19 will be in how we live and work after the pandemic, with new measures emerging during the pandemic, such as working from home, that I believe will expedite many pre-existing trends. It will likely be a more dangerous time on our roads when movement restrictions are eased in coming weeks and months. As we return to the roads, the question is: how will we navigate this period, and who is we? The “we” is everyone. Like Covid-19, road safety beckons: ‘we’re all in this together’. While we may all be rejoining the road network with changed behaviours, as a different type of road user, and one that may lack recent practice, we cannot rely only on enforcement, the expectation that everyone will do the right thing, and our memories.
While it may be a dangerous time, it is also a time of opportunity in road safety. Perhaps the resilience and lateral thinking we’ve demonstrated as a community in devising simple but creative ways to connect can be replicated towards reducing road trauma, with road safety champions leveraging online communities to bring people together.
It’s a time to develop well-targeted messaging and innovative road safety awareness campaigns that build on this community spirit, the ability to band together as we’ve shown in recent weeks, and reflect our support for and acceptance of effective measures that have the best chance of achieving a safe system for everyone.
Proactive organisations – think insurance and transport in particular – can establish themselves as industry and community leaders by taking advantage of the CSR opportunities in promoting and rewarding safe driver behaviour. The trends of reducing cars in our cities can take a leap forward if government and business leaders accelerate plans to reduce interactions between vehicles and vulnerable road users, something we’ve gotten used to with the rapid move to working from home.
For meaningful and sustained behaviour change, leadership is required – luckily research released this week shows strong public support for leadership ‘for the greater good’. If we follow a methodology that includes raising education and awareness of the issue, motivating people to change, and creating a path for that change to happen, we can create changes in behaviours and the environment that will benefit our community in the long term.
Covid-19 has had a remarkable impact on how we have lived our lives in just a few short weeks. As we emerge into a post-restrictions world in the hopefully not-too-distant future, there is an opportunity to re-shape our thinking about how we approach the social challenges that remain from BC (Before Covid). We cannot take for granted that nothing’s changed. Road safety, and opportunities to reduce its health and economic costs, should feature prominently in that discussion.
Andrew Hardwick
Managing Director @ Hard Edge
CEO @ Re:act