Abstract
Pedestrian-train collisions have one of the highest mortality rates of any transport accident. Research suggests that learning safe pedestrian behaviours at a young age may be a protective factor against pedestrian accidents for young people throughout their childhood and later in life. The current study aimed to assess the effects of a narrative intervention on children’s attitudes towards their pedestrian safety around railways. Previous research targeting people’s pedestrian safety has implemented infrastructural measures to change pedestrian behaviours. Little research on educational interventions has been conducted, and even less with children. The current study had two people share stories about their experiences with pedestrian-train collisions with a group of intermediate school students. A rail safety slideshow presentation from Auckland Transport was also included. One of the speakers was hit by a train as a teenager and the other worked for New Zealand’s national rail body, KiwiRail, and had attended scenes of fatal pedestrian-train collisions.Questionnaires were used to assess the participants’ self-reported future likelihood of undertaking risky crossing behaviours and how safe they perceived these behaviours to be. Observations of these school students’ and other crossing users’ behaviours at local railway level crossings were also undertaken. The narrative intervention resulted in the participants reporting being less likely to undertake certain risky behaviours and reporting that they believed these behaviours to be less safe. Due to some limitations of the current study, it was not possible to use the observations to determine whether the levels of risky crossing behaviours changed following the intervention. The observations were instead used to identify patterns in crossing users’ behaviours. The current study concludes that the low incidence of pedestrian-train collisions makes it difficult to test the effectiveness of certain harm reduction strategies. Therefore, the incidence of risky behaviours, as opposed to near-misses and collisions, were used to determine the interventions’ efficacy. Future research directions are suggested including examining children’s pedestrian safety in virtual simulations and linking their real-world behaviours to their self-reported attitudes and beliefs.