When Students Become Road Safety Researchers
We love seeing students take the lead on road safety issues that matter to their communities. During Road Safety Week, Kristin School's SADD group did exactly that, using speed radar devices and observations to investigate driver behaviour during busy school drop-off and pick-up times.
Their findings provided valuable insights into local road safety challenges and demonstrated the power of student-led action. In this student-written blog, the Kristin SADD team shares their experience, findings, and reflections from the project. Read on to hear all about it.
Early in Term two, during Week 2, Kristin’s SADD group took part in road safety week where we decided to do some research in our community to see where the real problem is in our school community.
We got in touch with our Head of Health and Safety, Mr Thornton-Grimes, who spoke to our group about how many people either speed, or are very distracted. So, working alongside our teacher leaders, the SADD team split into groups to record the driving speeds and behaviours of parents and guardians as they entered campus. The end goal was to see how people were driving during the peak periods before and after school.
We collected this data in pairs over 10 sessions from Monday to Friday between 8:00 am and 8:30 am, and again from 3:00 pm to 3:30 pm. These are the pick up / drop off times when our campus is most busy.
Information was gathered at two separate locations. The first location was at Gate Entry 1, where traffic turns left after entering the school, and the second was directly opposite the staff car park, 10 metres in front of the crossing. At this spot, we used a handheld speed radar device, sourced from our school, to record how fast vehicles were moving as they approached our pedestrian crossing areas. We chose these areas as they have been identified as areas that people often speed in and show unsafe behaviour.
After all data was collected, members of our group collated it so we could present the facts to our community.
The speed limit at Kristin is set at 15 km/h. The data collected indicates that just over half of all vehicles travel within the 15–20 km/h range, with similar proportions recorded in the morning (52.7%) and afternoon (52.6%). Despite this, a significant number of drivers exceed the speed limit, particularly in the afternoon. In the morning, 38.5% of vehicles were recorded speeding, compared to 47.3% in the afternoon. Additionally, 14.8% of afternoon drivers exceeded 25 km/h, representing a higher level of potentially dangerous speeding.
It was certainly an interesting week! Standing out there in our fluorescent vests, with our clipboards and aiming speed radar devices, certainly drew a lot of attention. We received rather obvious stares and even a few concerned looks from drivers who were not quite sure what we were up to. This has also been acknowledged as a potential bias in our data collection process.
Using our data, we intend to analyse patterns, plan our next steps, inform our community, and suggest strategies to keep our Kristin community safe during peak hours. In conclusion, this was a really good activity for our SADD group, and we encourage every school to give this a go.
Written by Vongai Murombe, Sonia Zhao, and Laura Dong