Development of a new traffic safety education material for the future drivers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

According to the Global Status Report on Road Safety in 2015 from the World Health Organization (WHO), road traffic injuries claim more than 1.25 million lives each year, and they are the leading cause of death among young people aged between 15 and 29 years old. Road traffic fatalities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) account for 4.7% of all mortalities and have plateaued over the last decade at 22–25 per 100,000 people. According to the Ministry of Interior (MOI) and Police department, 460,488 traffic accidents occurring on the roads in the KSA leading to 7489 deaths and 33,139 injuries, have recorded during 2017 (1438 H)The improvement of drivers’ behavior through education, training, appropriate driver licensing and enforcement is recognized as a kernel in enhancing traffic and transport safety in the National Transportation Strategy. Moreover, it is accepted as an urgent issue to implement and strengthen institutional frameworks and capacities as well as targeted activities in the area of enforcement, engineering, education and emergency response on the national level. However, it is difficult to find any well-organized school traffic safety education material in KSA. For this reason, the objective of this paper was to propose a new traffic safety education material for children (under 13 years old) in KSA.Firstly, traffic safety regulations, policies and traffic safety education programs were reviewed and examined in the school of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Korea, Japan, and Sweden. Then the topics of the new traffic safety education material needed for children who will be the protagonists in KSA were chosen. In this new traffic safety education material, the utilization of various visual aids has been emphasized on for children’s better understanding such as cartoons, graphics, and pictures in the Arabic Language. Finally, questionnaire surveys were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the new material.It is expected that this research became an ignition in the KSA to respond to the global trend of intensive attention to traffic safety. The new material is expected to be actively used mainly in schools and at homes to correct the misbehaviors of road users, to decrease the mortality and morbidity from road traffic accidents, and ultimately to cut off both direct and indirect social costs caused by road traffic accidents in the KSA.