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.

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.