Assessment & Improvement of Children Road Safety: A Pyramid & Honeycomb Structure Approach

Abstract

In this research, a 4 hierarchical pyramid structure approach is proposed to assess children road safety. The first is referred to as the road safety pyramid representing children road safety components and levels including root, at accident and post accident levels and factors. The second, referred to as the children road safety assessment pyramid, includes 3 cornerstones that are required to represent a detailed methodological children road safety diagnostics. These 3 cornerstones include children safety culture, safety indicators and accident data analysis. The third pyramid, referred to as the children road safety indicators, shows the levels and types of indicators that when computed can be used for in depth analysis and historical comparison of children road safety. The core of the paper is the development of a conceptual model of factors affecting the road behavior of children including traffic exposure and experience, cognitive skills and abilities, perceptual skills, knowledge and attitude. Towards this end, the paper presents the fourth pyramid, referred to as the children road safety behavior pyramid. This includes a 7-level hierarchal structure starting from exposure leading to experience and then skills/abilities, to knowledge to perception to attitudes and eventually culminating into children road safety behavior. The paper concludes by developing a generic integrated children road safety package of policies, measures, initiatives. The package is composed of 18 fields of action. In pursuing such integrated safety package this research also enhanced the classical 3Es concept (Engineering—Education—Enforcement) and introduced instead the 14Es honeycomb structure including (Engineer-ing—Education—Environment—Enforcement—Egalitarianism—Exposure—Ethics—Emergency—Ergonomics—Encouragement—Empowerment—Enabling—Economics—Evaluation). All in all this is meant to act as a generic benchmark guide/checklist for countries in compiling and tailoring children road safety programmes.