Child-Centering Road Safety: Making Sure It Works for Girls and Boys

Challenges

Often, age and gender nuances in road safety interventions are not very visible. Baselines—if at all—do not go beyond segregating respondents as males and females. Too few inquiries are pursued on whether females have safer or riskier traveling practices, how they cope with harassments and assault on streets, or especially whether there are considerations for children.

The assumption is, when road safety programs are aimed at parents, that children are automatically protected. In Asia, children are often seen as extensions of parents, and their opinions are not taken seriously. Though kids are considered as road users, baselines and resulting interventions tend to target parents as the audience for road safety information to be passed on to children, as they are considered responsible for moving kids safely.

However, road traffic injuries are among the leading causes of death globally for children and young people, 5–29 years. The risk is higher for the youngest bracket, 5 to 9 years—the age when children start going to primary school and become active road users.

In addition to age, girls and boys exhibit different characteristics in their pedestrian behaviors. Boys are more likely to play on the side of the road and girls are more likely to walk two or three abreast. More male pedestrians than females are involved in road traffic crashes, especially in younger age groups. More effort is needed to determine and understand contextual risk factors for road traffic injuries and fatalities of children with implications for prevention.

Context

The Shaanxi Mountain Road Safety Demonstration Project aims to reduce road crash fatalities and serious injuries and provide efficient and safe all-weather accessibility in Shaanxi. The project covers Ankang City, including Xunyang County and Hanbin District, as well as Shangnan County in Shangluo City, and involves road upgrade and rehabilitation, incorporating major safety design enhancements.

In Ankang City, the transport bureau understood that rehabilitated trunk and rural roads can increase speeding, and unless these are designed with safety for all road users and not just cars, the most vulnerable road users—pedestrians and cyclists—will be at risk. Further, introducing new facilities, such as zebra crossings, are unlikely to be effective if users do not recognize them or know how to use them. For this reason, the bureau commissioned consultants from Shaanxi Gender Development Solution to improve user understanding of the project infrastructure changes, improve road safety knowledge, and influence behavior. This included dedicated interventions for children in three schools: Xiaohe Central Primary School, Chengguan Central Primary School, and Zhaowan Central Primary School.

Current road safety education usually follows a didactic approach, focusing on providing knowledge-based information to teachers, parents, and generally, any adult that could influence children’s way of thinking and behaving. This framework assumes that when knowledge is provided to these adults, it will be passed on to the kids who are then expected to remember and apply it now and in the future.

Adults are also assumed to model improved road safety behaviors after learning about them for children to emulate. In addition to modeling behavior, parents of younger children who have lower awareness of road safety must exercise primary responsibility to practice safety on their behalf.

Key Findings

Using mixed methods—survey, observation, and interviews of 1,361 children, parents, and teachers, the project looked not just at road safety knowledge from the point of view of adults but also from children’s behavior and the factors that influence why people act the way they do. They then went further to try to understand the different perceptions and behaviors of boys and girls around roads and address these through more accurate and successful interventions.

Below are the key findings among primary to middle school students that helped shape the road safety education interventions:

• Xunyang County is very mountainous characterized by steep, concrete, or asphalt roads.
• On average, most students attend nearby schools, with almost half living within 4 kilometers of school zones.
• About 76% of students are accompanied by parents to and from school; 24% of students go to school by themselves (percentage for girls is slightly higher than boys), 86% of whom walk. Others take the public bus (percentage of girls is slightly higher) while the rest ride bicycles and take the school bus (with the percentage of boys slightly higher in the last two modes).
• In group interviews, most students correctly answered more than 95% of questions on road safety behavior, with no difference between the answers of boys and girls. However:
  • Students had low recognition of universal road traffic signs. Boys and girls showed less than 70% understanding of what red and green signals meant; only 52% recognized what yellow meant.
  • Only 52% recognized pedestrian/zebra crossings.
  • About 25% of parents also failed to recognize pedestrian/zebra crossing signs.

Survey responses showed that students had high awareness of road safety. However, in practice, their actual actions revealed otherwise, with many students displaying risky behaviors on the road.

Solutions

The ADB-supported Shaanxi Mountain Road Safety Demonstration Project adopted child-centered methodologies, developing age-appropriate curriculum for three levels of primary school students, including story books, games, simulation, and group learning activities. These are the key lessons.