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Article Excerpt
The ability to assess road risk and to act effectively on that assessment is a key skill in the modern world. Understanding how and when we develop this skill is critical if we are to reduce pedestrian accidents in general and child pedestrian accidents in particular. One way to understand more about accidents is to investigate user perceptions of the traffic scenes and specifically their perception of danger in the judgment of such scenes (Chapman & Underwood, 1998). The perception of road risk is partially a function of the cognitive schemata by which road users represent features, functions and operations of the traffic system (Riemersma, 1988). This study investigated whether there were identifiable developmental trends in the perception of road risk assessment, that is in the cognitive schemas individuals hold of roads, and if so whether those trends add to our understanding of why specific groups, namely children, are most at risk on UK roads. A second question stemming from the differential statistics for child pedestrian accidents for boys vs. girls, investigated whether there were discernable sex differences in the reading of road risk.
The scale of the problem
The UK Government's White Paper A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone (Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1998) highlighted the importance of improved road safety for all road users. Central to this paper was the argument that pedestrians and cyclists must be provided with a safe environment, where they are not intimidated by traffic. Although the number of road deaths and reported serious injuries occurring on UK's roads has declined in recent years (British Medical Association, 1997) the risk of being killed on the road network in any given year is one in 10,000, and over a lifetime all road users can expect to either cause or be involved in a road traffic accident (Petch & Henson, 2000).
In the UK, accidental injury is the second most common form of death in children over 1 year of age and is eclipsed only by childhood cancer. Despite a steady decline over a number of years, in England and Wales in 2002 deaths due to accidental injury still accounted for nearly 43% of fatalities in the 1-14 years age group. Of these deaths a significant proportion were due to road accidents where the child was a pedestrian (Health Development Agency, 2005). In 2004, 77 child pedestrians were killed in road accidents in the UK and 2,262 sustained serious injuries. Furthermore, with a child pedestrian death rate of 0.7 per 100,000 of the population, the UK has one of the worst records in Europe, exceeded only by Belgium, Greece, the Irish Republic, Luxembourg and Portugal. This poor record can be contrasted with the death rate for car users killed in road accidents where the UK has one of the best records compared to other European countries (Department for Transport, 2005). Boys are also twice as likely to be killed or to sustain serious injury in pedestrian and cycle accidents as girls (Department for Transport, 2004), with children in the lowest socio-economic group (SEG) five times more likely to be killed as pedestrians than their higher SEG counterparts (Health Development Agency, 2005).
Child pedestrian casualties peak at about the age of 12, and child cyclist casualties at about the age of 14. Overall, nearly a fifth of child pedestrian casualties happen on the school journey (Department for Transport, 2003), but this proportion increases for secondary school aged children (Department for Transport, 2000). These statistics highlight a long-standing problem. In 1968, Burton presented analyses of 1963 accident figures and reported very similar findings; she showed that child pedestrians were most vulnerable between the ages of 6 and 12 years old, with greater numbers of boys being involved in such events compared to girls, while child cyclist accidents peaked at 14 years of age. Little appears to have changed in the intervening years.
A study of self-reported road behaviours within this vulnerable secondary age group by the TRL (Transport Research Laboratory, 2003) showed that children in the 11 and 12-year-old bracket and/or females were more likely to exhibit desirable road safety behaviours than 13 to 16 olds or males in general. TRL identified two patterns of behaviour which were of concern; 'unsafe road crossing practices' and 'dangerous playing in the road' (e.g. 'playing chicken by deliberately running out in front of cars') and showed that these increased as young adolescents increased their non-adult supervised exposure to traffic scenes.
Learning to read the road
Burton (1968) pointed out that road accidents in comparison to, for example, child domestic accidents, are not easily ignored since they are public events. They are also a class of accidents for which children have been instructed to take special care. As a consequence of this visibility there has been a two-pronged approach to reducing the high occurrence of child pedestrian accidents. These are the engineering response through traffic calming measures such as speed bumps, or functional demarcation such as colouring cycle routes red in Amsterdam or green in Edinburgh (Carsten, Zakowska, & Jamson, 2005; Steyvers, 1993) and the training response in which children learn rules of the road (Singh, 1982).
Underpinning this educative response to child road risk has been research into perceptual skills (David, Foot, & Chapman, 1990), attentional skills (Dunbar, Hill, & Lewis, 2001), knowledge of danger (Grieve & Williams, 1985; Hill, Lewis, & Dunbar, 2000) and the significance of parent or peer discussion in the training process (Dunbar, Lewis, & Hill, 2002; Tolmie et al., 2005). The most widely practised training responses focus on teaching generalizable rules of the road which can support the child in any situation (Thompson, Tolmie, Foot, & McLaren, 1996). However, the successful application of such taught rules or skills requires children to be able to apply them in a variety of different contexts (Hill et al., 2000), but knowing the rules of the road does not necessarily result in safer road-crossing behaviour on the part of children (Ryhammer & Bergaland, 1980; Zeedyk, Wallace, Carcary, Jones, & Larter, 2001). Tolmie et al. argue that children commonly fail to see how rules, such as those incorporated in the UK's Green Cross Code (Singh, 1982), relate to actual events, but that this is not surprising given that learning proceeds from the specific to the general and from action to representation.
Yagil (2000) raises another issue concerning how pedestrians respond to the rules of the road. She found that road-crossing behaviour was predicted by normative rather than instrumental motives. Social norms make it acceptable to cross a road on a 'don't walk' sign if the road appears clear; a lesson many children readily learn when out with their parents or older siblings. In such cases children are exposed to two codes of behaviour; the official and the unofficial social norm, and the latter often take precedence.
Children's concept of risk
Although young children have been shown to have a rudimentary concept of danger (Hill et al., 2000), they are poor at identifying dangerous situations; that is, they have not developed an adequate perception of risk. For example, children may recognize that cars (Ampofo-Boateng & Thompson, 1991), fire and water (Grieve & Williams, 1985) are all dangerous, but fail to recognize when the object or phenomenon poses a threat; that is they fail to contextualize risk. For such children danger is seen as an intrinsic feature of an object--so matches are dangerous but furry animals are not. Only later comes the understanding that objects are dangerous in certain settings (Hill et al., 2000). For example, in a pilot study we found that...
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