April 23-29 Is Global Road Safety Week
Posted 04/23/2007
The United Nations Global Road Safety Week aims to raise awareness about the societal impact of road traffic injuries, and to promote action around key factors that can prevent road traffic injuries. Find out how UMTRI strives to meet these goals every day.
Road Safety Is No Accident
The week’s slogan, "road safety is no accident," highlights the fact that road safety does not happen by accident, but through the deliberate efforts of many individuals and many sectors of society. UMTRI contributes to road safety through research areas such as crash avoidance and active safety; crash/injury data collection, management, and analysis; heavy truck safety; human factors and driver behavior; injury/impact biomechanics; and occupant restraint system use.
Young Road Users
The theme of Global Road Safety Week is "young road users," as young people constitute the major group at risk of death, injury, and disability on the road. Nationwide, young drivers have recently been given high priority in research with funding from federal and non-governmental agencies. UMTRI has a long-standing research emphasis on young drivers, and its faculty are often sought out as experts on young driver issues.
Current UMTRI projects related to teen drivers include:
- Conducting ongoing evaluations of Michigan's graduated driver licensing (GDL) system (an article on recent worldwide GDL results will appear in the April issue of the Journal of Safety Research)
- Studying statewide data to identify types of crashes for which teens are at excess risk compared to adults
- Examining the effectiveness of electronic devices that parents can use to monitor their teens' driving and the devices’ effect on increasing safe driving by the teens
- Evaluating the two largest driving schools in Michigan in terms of the attitudes, knowledge, offenses, and crashes of graduates from the schools, as well as curriculum content and instructional process
- Conducting an ongoing, longitudinal study of the psychosocial correlates of adolescent driving, which has followed a large sample of young people from fifth grade into their young adulthood and is now focused on at-risk drinking and drink-driving
- Examining parental involvement in teen driving, especially in evaluating programs that are delivered in driver education settings at the end of the learner phase
UMTRI faculty have been invited to speak on young drivers at various annual meetings including the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Governor’s Highway Safety Association, the Driving Schools Association of the Americas, and the Lifesavers Conference on Highway Safety Priorities. Jean Shope was an invited speaker and Ray Bingham an invited participant at the National Safety Council's "International Symposium on Novice Teen Driving: GDL and Beyond" in February. They have also provided testimony to the National Transportation Safety Board’s Public Forum on driver education and training, and were invited to write an article on the problem of teen driving for a special issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. They both participated in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Teen Driving Injury Prevention Roundtable last June, which Shope helped to plan. Bingham participated as a member of the Michigan Teen Driver Safety Team, and Shope spoke at the event and facilitated the roundtable discussion.
Shope was an invited member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Contributions from the Behavioral and Social Sciences in Preventing Teen Motor Crashes. She was also the keynote speaker, focusing on GDL, at the Australasian Road Safety Conference in October, and has served on the expert panel of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia/State Farm Young Driver Research Initiative.
UMTRI at a Global Level
On a global level, UMTRI has established Strategic Worldwide Transportation (SWT) 2020, an initiative to significantly reduce traffic-related fatalities worldwide. Member companies include Bosch, Continental Teves, Ford, Nissan Technical Center North America, Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing North America, and TRW, and sponsors include Autoliv, IBM, and Visteon. Members met in late March to discuss the progress and direction of the program. Michael Sivak, program director, says, "The guiding principle for SWT 2020 is to identify those countermeasures that have the greatest effect on the total harm caused by road crashes. We are very sensitive to differences between countries in all relevant aspects such as road infrastructure, vehicle population, traffic mix, cultural expectations, and economic considerations. Therefore, our analyses will be tailored to individual countries or regions."