Older Motorcyclists and Road Safety Education: An Australian context

Road safety has become a worldwide public health concern. Although many factors contribute to collisions, pedestrian behaviors can strongly influence road safety outcomes. This paper presents results of a survey investigating the effects of age, gender, attitudes towards road safety, fatalistic beliefs and risk perceptions on self-reported pedestrian behaviors in a Chinese example. The study was carried out on 543 participants (229 men and 314 women) from 20 provinces across China. Pedestrian behaviors were assessed by four factors: errors, violations, aggressions, and lapses. Younger people reported performing riskier pedestrian behaviors compared to older people. Gender was not an influential factor. Of the factors explored, attitudes towards road safety explained the most amount of variance in self-reported behaviors. Significant additional variance in risky pedestrian behaviors was explained by the addition of fatalistic beliefs. The differences among the effects, and the implications for road safety intervention design, are discussed. In particular, traffic managers can provide road safety education and related training activities to influence pedestrian behaviors positively.

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An Adaptive Game-Based Learning Strategy for Children Road Safety Education and Practice in Virtual Space

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21113661 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (11) ◽

pp. 3661

Author(s):

Noman Khan ◽

Khan Muhammad ◽

Tanveer Hussain ◽

Mansoor Nasir ◽

Muhammad Munsif ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Real World ◽

Road Safety ◽

Learning Strategy ◽

Real Life ◽

Safety Training ◽

Virtual Space ◽

Safety Education ◽

Average Output ◽

Training Environment ◽

The Road

Virtual reality (VR) has been widely used as a tool to assist people by letting them learn and simulate situations that are too dangerous and risky to practice in real life, and one of these is road safety training for children. Traditional video- and presentation-based road safety training has average output results as it lacks physical practice and the involvement of children during training, without any practical testing examination to check the learned abilities of a child before their exposure to real-world environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a 3D realistic open-ended VR and Kinect sensor-based training setup using the Unity game engine, wherein children are educated and involved in road safety exercises. The proposed system applies the concepts of VR in a game-like setting to let the children learn about traffic rules and practice them in their homes without any risk of being exposed to the outside environment. Thus, with our interactive and immersive training environment, we aim to minimize road accidents involving children and contribute to the generic domain of healthcare. Furthermore, the proposed framework evaluates the overall performance of the students in a virtual environment (VE) to develop their road-awareness skills. To ensure safety, the proposed system has an extra examination layer for children’s abilities evaluation, whereby a child is considered fit for real-world practice in cases where they fulfil certain criteria by achieving set scores. To show the robustness and stability of the proposed system, we conduct four types of subjective activities by involving a group of ten students with average grades in their classes. The experimental results show the positive effect of the proposed system in improving the road crossing behavior of the children.

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