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Guidelines for Selecting Communication Channels to Deliver Traffic Safety Messaging

City street with a roadwork sign and traffic cones
Developing comprehensive guidance effective behavioral traffic safety messaging for state highway safety offices
  • Client
    National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine, Transportation Research Board
  • Dates
    December 2022 – March 2025

Problem

Education is a quick and flexible approach to enhancing traffic safety.

For decades, the three Es approach—Engineering, Enforcement, and Education—has been employed to enhance transportation safety. Each of these factors plays a fundamental role in supporting roadway safety; however, education is often the most flexible to changing circumstances and safety needs. While enforcement changes must go through the regulatory process, and engineering changes may take years or decades to implement, education campaigns can be developed and deployed relatively quickly in response to new safety needs in specific locations (e.g., a hot spot of pedestrian crashes) or new safety concerns (e.g., in response to driving-related concerns surrounding cannabis legalization). For these reasons, it is imperative to develop up-to-date guidelines and tools to support the rapid and effective development and deployment of a wide range of behavioral safety campaigns.

Solution

NORC will systematically evaluate recent campaigns to ascertain effective and generalizable approaches.

To determine the most effective message and campaign approaches, NORC will evaluate recent and ongoing campaigns at federal, state, and local levels with a particular focus on campaigns sponsored by state highway safety offices. Using evidence from these evaluations, we will develop up-to-date, comprehensive guidance for the delivery of effective behavioral traffic safety messaging, including how different delivery methods and content affect a wide variety of demographic groups.  

Result

State highway safety offices will have a concise guide to help them develop locally-effective traffic safety communications campaigns.

The primary product produced by this project will be a concise, illustrated guide for delivering effective behavioral traffic safety messaging, including considerations for reaching various demographic and road user groups along with the costs associated with various delivery methods. This guide will be accompanied by a final report documenting the entire project and incorporating all other specified deliverables of the research, an electronic presentation of the findings, a technical memorandum describing the strengths and limitations of the research and recommendations for future research, a technical memorandum entitled Implementation of Research Findings and Products, and a series of downloadable social media message templates.

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