Understanding the problem
It’s really important to understand the issue(s) affecting
your communities before being able to provide a
targeted and effective approach to those issues¹. This
involves understanding whether the issue is with a
particular group of people, for example, with ‘young
drivers’, ‘repeat offenders’, ‘people who drive for work’ or
‘males’, or if it’s at a particular time, on particular days,
or at particular locations. Different problems will require
different tactics so tailoring what we do to what we
want to influence is crucial.
But ‘understanding the problem’ also, crucially, means
understanding whether you actually do have the
problem you think you do. Sometimes we might believe
that a certain behaviour is responsible for our statistics,
but it might not be. For example, the issue of mobile
phone use often gets talked about in the same breath
as ‘distracted driving’ - but the two are not the same
thing.
Distracted driving can include all sorts
of activities such as eating at the wheel,
talking to (or being talked to by) passengers.
If your issue is one of these, and not mobile
phone use, then efforts to target phone use
won’t get us the results we want.
Sometimes the way statistics are recorded is unhelpful
as it can mean that a variety of different behaviours are
clumped together under a single heading. With limited
time and resources, we need to make sure that we are
focusing on exactly the behaviour that is causing harm.
In this section we also give some sources of potential
information to help guide our activity, and some caveats
for where we need to be cautious and ask questions
about that data.
Where to find data
There are a number of places that you may be able to
look for data to identify the problem and any particular
group of interest within that problem¹. You should start
by looking within your own organisation - whether
that is a police force, local authority, or road safety
partnership - as you may find that the information you
are looking for is available for you there.
If you think the data you want exists already, but is
being held by someone who won’t share it, try going
higher up in their organisation to someone who will
know if sharing is possible and who can approve it
being shared with you. People can be nervous about
sharing data, but if it’s anonymous and high level
(and that’s all we need) then there’s not usually any
reason not to share it, so don’t be put off by being told
no ‘because of GDPR and all that’. GDPR may not be
relevant to the kind of data you are asking for!
Local police forces collect personal-injury road traffic
accident data (known as ‘STATS19’) and this may be
particularly useful (if you can get access to it). This
data also feeds into many of the other data sources
that you may find. There are limitations, though as the
role of mobile phone use in a crash may not always be
identified and (of course) near misses and minor bumps
won’t get recorded at all.
¹ RoSPA (2017). Designing evidence based road safety interventions. Available from: https://www.rospa.com/rospaweb/docs/advice-services/road-safety/
practitioners/evidence-based-intervention-guide.pdf
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