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Paper Title:
A method for evaluating
the 40 km/h intiative around school buses in NSW
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Authors:
Fiona Green, Shannon
Newman, Wendy Stephenson, Ray Taylor
Abstract:
School bus safety is
a prominent road safety issue. A recently released Austroads report
on school bus safety highlighted the magnitude of the school bus
safety accident problem in Australia, and provides commentary relating
to new initiatives and strategic directions to address the issue.
In January 2000, the safety of students around school buses was
the focus of a major road safety initiative in NSW. The initiative
involved implementing lower speeds around school buses, through
a system of yellow, flashing lights accompanied by a 40 km/h speed
limit sign. Although a preliminary evaluation was completed on a
trial of the initiative, a larger scale evaluation was required
once the initiative was implemented state-wide. This paper aims
to present the techniques adopted in the evaluation, rather than
present the results of the evaluation. The evaluation included community
attitude surveys; focus group interviews with bus drivers in urban
and rural NSW; face-to-face interviews with key stakeholders; analysis
of crashes 'before' and 'after' introduction of the initiative;
and an evaluation of driver behaviour around school buses. The final
part of the evaluation required development of two techniques to
record driver behaviour and assess how drivers reacted to the flashing
lights program in both urban and rural settings.
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