While discussions of traffic problems and the search for solutions are typically focused on traffic behavior itself, the recognition that traffic safety is a fundamentally cultural issue suggests the utility of deriving lessons from other culturally defined problems in order to inform and provide an analytical reference point for traffic safety cultural change approaches. Accordingly, instead of examining traffic behavior per se, the focus here is on major issues from other policy arenas that have been prominent on the public agenda and in which fundamental cultural change has been

the preeminent policy goal: solid waste recycling, drug abuse, and tobacco use.

By examining their basic goals and parameters, detailing their practical applications and approaches, and assessing their relative effectiveness, related anti-waste, anti-drug, and antismoking intervention strategies can provide practical insights to inform future efforts for improving traffic safety culture.

Review of related approaches reveals that, while specific details may differ, general strategies have been largely the same across areas. An examination of successful and unsuccessful initiatives reveals most emphatically that such problems must be addressed at, not only the individual level, but the cultural level involving the attitudes and values affecting behavior. Practically speaking, most change initiatives will only be effective when supplemented with other efforts at community capacity building and deployed in combination with others.

Moreover, a crucial point derived from consideration of various cultural initiatives is that, even if change initially occurs, it cannot be maintained in the face of inconsistent norms in the larger society without subsequent reinforcement.

Applying lessons gleaned from anti-waste, anti-drug, and anti-smoking interventions to problems of traffic safety, recommendations are offered focusing on 1) education programs addressing home, school, and community influences, 2) multilevel strategies addressing social environments, and 3) interventions addressing social and economic conditions. Moreover, these recommendations are linked to a variety of intervention approaches using multiple tactics at multiple levels of influence, involving a variety of societal sectors, focusing on general cultural determinants, and employing both short- and long-term perspectives. In short, coordinated, sustained, multilevel approaches offer the greatest promise for realizing a traffic safety culture. Traffic accidents are one of the most prominent causes of premature injury, handicap and death in the modern world. In children, the problem is so severe that pedestrian accidents are widely regarded as the most serious of all health risks facing children in developed countries. Not surprisingly, educational measures have long been advocated as a means of teaching children how to cope with traffic and substantial resources have been devoted to their development and provision. Unfortunately, there seems to be a widespread view at the present time that education has not achieved as much as had been hoped and that there may even be quite strict limits to what can be achieved through education. This would, of course, shift the emphasis away from education altogether towards engineering or urban planning measures aimed at creating an intrinsically safer environment in which the need for education might be reduced or even eliminated. However, whilst engineering measures undoubtedly have a major role to play in the effort to reduce accidents, this outlook is both overly optimistic about the benefits of engineering and overly pessimistic about the limitations of education. At the same time, a fresh analysis is clearly required both of the aims and methods of contemporary road safety education. The present report is designed to provide such an analysis and to establish a framework within which further debate and research can take place.

No educational programme can expect to succeed unless it is founded on clear and explicitly-stated

objectives. Without these, the programme would be unfocused and evaluation impossible. Unfortunately, this basic requirement has not been well served by road safety initiatives in the UK. Many programmes in this country set themselves only the most general of aims, such as 'reducing accidents'. Such aims are perfectly laudable but are far too broad to be functional as educational objectives. Where programmes do set more fine-grained objectives, the majority are concerned with improving children's knowledge about traffic or instilling good attitudes towards safety. Implicit in such programmes is the assumption that changes in knowledge or attitudes will lead to changes in actual traffic behaviour. However, this confounds a secondary objective (improving knowledge) with a primary objective (improving behaviour). Whether the one leads to the other is an empirical question requiring demonstration. In fact, the evidence suggests that there is no direct link between knowledge and behaviour at all, raising serious questions about the validity of much traditional road safety education.