How to Successfully Engage a Community in Road Safety

Lack of community engagement in road safety issues has been a difficult barrier to achieving greater road safety outcomes. In this project, our aim was to develop a road safety campaign that humanises cyclists. We devised a four-step approach to develop and implement the campaign to engage the community and achieve positive outcomes. The four steps were: 1) key stakeholder engagement, 2) community consultation, 3) campaign creation and delivery and, 4) evaluation. As this project was conducted in 2020/2021, we address how we managed disruptions caused by COVID-19. Key findings show the campaign was successful and increased understanding of safe behaviours and positive influence on attitudes about cyclists. The frameworks used for this project are provided and while the insights from this project apply to cyclist safety, the steps can be applied to improve collaborative projects to include community engagement in any area of road safety.