Area of Opportunity 4: Results focus, monitoring and evaluation

5.5Area of Opportunity 5: Research, development and knowledge transfer.

Recommendation 5: Exercise care in determining what to research and build capacity of Road Safety staff across federal, state, and municipal agencies

Recommendation 5.1: Exercise care in determining when to undertake research versus when to adopt successes from elsewhere. Various aspects of Brazil are unique, but many aspects of Road Safety are shared with other countries: Brazil can save time and resources through judicious decisions regarding the extent to which successful actions elsewhere can be transferred to Brazil. (One distinctive aspect of Road Safety in Brazil is the excessively high ratio of disabilities to serious injuries, or the ratio of disabilities to deaths).

Recommendation 5.2: Road Safety research skills must be amplified in universities, institutes and government organizations, to ensure research and development is possible when needed.

Recommendation 5.3: Build capacity of Road Safety staff across federal, state, and municipal agents including safe systems and other training, and provide appropriate powers and influence. Staff capacity building and knowledge transfer are needed to improve Road Safety, though small pockets of expert Road Safety staff exist. Selected Universities in Brazil could develop Road Safety training packages to produce a much needed local stream of Road Safety skilled staff.

Recommendation 5.4: Provide transfer of knowledge through more specialized training, including safe systems training. These staff should be able to assist in the training of staff in Brazil, including providing greater understanding of Road Safety and safe systems to staff not seen as Road Safety but who are involved in related activities. A number of courses for formal training in Road Safety exist now (e.g., at Delft University in the Netherlands, CARRS-Q or Monash University, Australia, or could be developed in Brazilian universities).

All recommendations in Area of Opportunity 5 are identified as medium term actions except recommendation 5.2, which is longer term.

5.6Area of Opportunity 6: Multi-sectoral promotion, advocacy, and education for Road Safety

Recommendation 6: Road Safety promotion and education in Brazil needs to be best practice, more systematic, consistent, and evidence based.

Recommendation 6.1: NGOs, private enterprise, and the community must be more engaged in promotion of, and understanding of, Road Safety. The key role of government and the need for strong decisions in Road Safety should be a core part of messages to the community in educational/awareness raising communications and campaigns. NGOs may contribute more to Road Safety through advocacy for stronger government action, thus both pushing and allowing governments to do more.

Recommendation 6.2: Foster independent Road Safety commentary from universities and the research community. Road Safety researchers can be valuable Road Safety advocates to government, the media, and the community.

Recommendation 6.3: Establish a multi-partisan Congressional Road Safety Committee, with the role of conducting enquiries into specific Road Safety issues and producing public reports advising Government on Road Safety actions, from a sound and rigorous evidenced based standpoint not on a popularity basis. The Lead Agency should provide technical advice to the Committee.

Recommendation 6.4: Strengthen Road Safety Government partnerships with industry and business, and facilitate and reward sound safety culture through such policies as making Road Safety performance a factor in the letting of government tenders. Adoption of the International Standards Organization Road Safety Standard (ISO 39001) by companies could form the basis for this process.

Recommendation 6.5: Offer systematic age appropriate education on Road Safety to school-age children delivered by school teachers. Road Safety education should be comprehensively reviewed by Road Safety experts to ensure systematic coverage as part of the school curriculum, which should not include driver or any motorized two wheel training at school age because evaluations have shown that this is not useful for Road Safety and may increases crash risk.⁶³ Ad hoc visiting Road Safety presentations by well-meaning but non-expert teachers should be abandoned. Road crashes cause more deaths among school age children than any other cause of death.

Recommendation 6.6: Sustain effort in effective media coverage for Road Safety action. Additional actions for the development of media coverage in the medium term should include:

Making crash data fully accessible to media for public scrutiny, credibility and transparency of government, at federal, state and municipal levels (with the development of the new comprehensive crash database, as occurs now at the federal level for DataSUS);

Increased use of paid media for Road Safety messages.

Recommendation 6.7: Paid media advertising including posters for Road Safety should be more evidence-based, including establishing (though research) the current relevant attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Media campaigns based on credible enforcement work more effectively for behavior change than most campaigns and especially more effectively than campaigns based on severe crashes (because of perceptions of invulnerability and driver overconfidence), or knowledge based campaigns (because Road Safety problem behaviors are generally a motivation problem not a knowledge problem).

Recommendation 6.8: Organize, on a yearly basis, publicly accessible annual multi-disciplinary national Road Safety conferences. Such conferences should: (i) review the Road Safety performance of the last year; (ii) allow analyses of performance to be presented from independent experts, researchers and auditors; and (iii) allow dissemination on successes and failures. Strong media presence should be encouraged to improve public understanding and government accountability.

For this Area of Opportunity, Recommendation 6.7 is identified as short term action while all other recommendations in area of opportunity 6 are medium term.