BTSCRP Research Report 14: Evaluating Traffic Safety Campaigns: A Guide provides insights into current practices for measuring the effectiveness of behavioral-based traffic safety campaigns. It also presents a framework for evaluating traffic safety campaigns, with the goal of designing and conducting future campaigns to more effectively promote safer road user behaviors. This report will be of interest to state highway safety offices (SHSOs) and other stakeholders concerned with understanding the effectiveness of traffic safety campaigns and associated outcomes.
Most states have engaged in some sort of behavioral-based traffic safety programs using education and enforcement to change road user behavior. Well-known examples include NHTSA’s Click It or Ticket and Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over campaigns. With law enforcement agencies across the nation now facing resource challenges, many states are experiencing less participation in these types of campaigns.
Some states have launched new behavioral-based traffic safety campaigns focused more on public awareness, education, and individual responsibility. These campaigns can present some evidence of effectiveness, but such effects are often limited to communication metrics (e.g., number of impressions) rather than behavioral outcomes. A better understanding of how to measure the effectiveness of such campaigns would help create successful and sustainable initiatives.
Under BTSCRP Project BTS-18, “Objectives, Components, and Measures of Effective Traffic Safety Public Awareness and Education Efforts,” Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was asked to (1) identify current practices used by SHSOs and other entities to evaluate the effectiveness of traffic safety campaigns and associated outcomes, and (2) develop a practical and scalable framework for evaluating how to engage road users, through traffic safety campaigns, to change behavior and improve safety performance. The focus of this research was public awareness and education campaigns regarding nonenforcement traffic safety.
Appendix A, Costing Tool, and an evaluation matrix are supplemental products to BTSCRP Research Report 14. These products can be found on the National Academies Press website (nap.nationalacademies.org) by searching for BTSCRP Research Report 14: Evaluating Traffic Safety Campaigns: A Guide.
BTSCRP Web-Only Document 7 is a companion to BTSCRP Research Report 14. The web-only document describes the research methodology and can be found on the National Academies Press website (nap.nationalacademies.org) by searching for BTSCRP Web-Only Document 7: Objectives, Components, and Measures of Effective Traffic Safety Public Awareness and Education Efforts.
