Community Action for Safe Speeds (CASS) Study
Background
Speeding remains a major contributing factor in road crashes and associated road trauma. Non-compliance with posted speed limits is a widespread international problem and survey research consistently demonstrates widespread misperceptions about the risks of speeding and negative community attitudes towards speed management initiatives. Having positive public attitudes towards safe travel speeds is critical to speed limit compliance, as is public understanding of the risks associated with unsafe speeds. A widespread challenge relates to how to shift the community’s attitudes on speeding and increase their acceptance of speed management interventions which in turn would increase public demand for safer speeds. These sentiments are reflected in a 2016 Austroads report titled “Public Demand for Safer Speeds: Identification of Interventions for Trial” and are acknowledged by the Australian National Road Safety Strategy as it pushes for a wholistic approach to Speed Management.
Traditionally, interventions targeting speeding have largely been developed using a ‘top-down’ approach with limited success. There is an increasing understanding that complex issues, such as shifting community attitudes on speeding, are better addressed through participatory interventions co-developed with end-users. In other words, a ‘bottom-up’ approach. One such approach is called the Community Jury. It aims to elicit informed community perspectives by forming a jury made-up of a representative group of community members who will 1) listen to experts deliver evidence about a problem and how it might be solved, and 2) cross-examine the experts and deliberate the evidence amongst themselves to come-up with community-driven solution(s). An individual’s initial views/beliefs can be transformed through listening to the reasoning of others and being asked to justify their views to the group. Historically, Community Juries have been primarily used as a mechanism for participatory decision making and/or priority setting, however there is emerging evidence of their value in generating recommendations for development of interventions. In this project, we plan to apply this method in a new way to bring innovation to one of the most pressing and long-standing road safety problems - safe speeds.
Aim
The overall aim of the body of work is to find innovative ways to reduce speeding-related road trauma in New South Wales through increasing public demand for safer speeds. This work will be carried out in two phases. Phase 1 aims to use a novel, community-driven participatory decision-making method (Community Jury) to develop an informed, community-driven set of evidence-based recommendations for local education and awareness initiatives to increase demand for safe speeds across five local government areas (LGAs) in New South Wales. Phase 2 aims to pilot one or more of the recommended initiatives and evaluate their impact on community attitudes to speeding and on actual travel speeds in various locations in each of the LGAs.
Research Methodology
Phase 1 – Community Juries
The Community Juries will take place across five experimental LGAs (2 metropolitan, 3 regional) in NSW: City of Sydney, City of Canterbury Bankstown, Mid-Western Regional, City of Coffs Harbour and Port Stephens. Between 12-20 individuals will be recruited from each LGA to participate in the community jury. Community demographic statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics as well as consultation with the local road safety officers will ensure that the jury members recruited are a diverse and demographically representative sample of the community. All participants are expected to attend four jury meetings held in their local area across a four-week period and will be guided by an external facilitator neutral to the local council and the research team.
At these jury meetings, the participants will be given the opportunity to listen to evidence presented by external and local experts on all matters related to safe speeds, community perceptions and attitudes. The external panel will be made-up of road safety experts, neutral to the research team, who have expertise in biomechanical engineering, traffic engineering, speed management, and behavioural science. The local experts will be sourced by the local road safety officer and can include individuals such as first responders or someone with a lived experience. The jury members are encouraged to deliberate and cross-examine the experts, and the evidence presented to them. By the end of the fourth meeting, the jurors are to come up with a list of recommendations detailing how their local government can increase the demand for safer speeds in the community. These recommendations must be made with the following questions in mind:
1. How can we achieve acceptance of, and generate demand for, safe speeds?
2. What is the most useful and compelling information for increasing understanding about safe speeds?
3. What do you believe are the most effective ways to create a shift in public attitudes toward safe driving speeds?
The external facilitator will be responsible for drafting a final report of these recommendations to summarise the outcomes of the jury meetings.
Phase 2 – Pilot and Process Evaluation
At least one of the recommendations described in the final report from the Community Jury will be trialled in their local area. For example, a recommendation made by the jury in Canterbury Bankstown will only be trialled in the Canterbury Bankstown local area and not in one of the other four participating experimental LGAs. The APEASE (Acceptability, Practicability, Effectiveness, Affordability, Spill-over effects, and Equity) criteria will be used by the research team and local government council workers to rank the recommendations and select a least one to be implemented in the community.
A quasi-experimental controlled before and after approach will be used to evaluate the potential impact of the recommendations on the community. This will involve 1) measuring the community attitudes to speed through an online survey and measuring speed behaviour at pre-defined speeding hotspots throughout each experimental LGA, prior to the implementation of the recommendation(s) and 6 months after the implementation, and 2) measuring the community attitudes and speed behaviour at the same time-points in two control LGAs (one metropolitan and one regional). At least 350 participants will be recruited from each LGA to complete the attitudes survey.
A process evaluation will also be conducted to examine the success or other wise of the recommendations in the experimental LGAs. This will be done through focus group interviews with individuals who were involved in implementing the recommendation(s) in each LGA (e.g. council workers) and community members who were exposed to the recommendation(s). This will provide insight into the feasibility of the overall community jury approach and confidence that any difference or lack of difference in the community attitudes and behaviour to speed can be attributed to the recommendations or not. An economic evaluation to examine the costs involved in using community juries to develop the community-tailored recommendations, and the costs associated with implementing the recommendations is also planned to be conducted.
Current Status
Community juries are currently being held in the City of Canterbury-Bankstown. All four community jury meetings and the intervention development workshop using the APEASE criteria have been completed at Mid-Western Regional and Port Stephens. Recruitment for juries to be held in Sydney and Coffs Harbour will begin soon.
