CAST - Campaigns and Awareness-raising Strategies in Traffic Safety
CAST is a Specific Targeted Research Project supported by the European Commission, aimed at meeting the Commission’s needs for enhancing traffic safety by means of effective road safety campaigns.
The project is assembled to provide a powerful and innovative tool for the evaluation of road safety campaigns that can be used by the Member States, by the EC for its own campaigns (or campaigns financed by the EC) and by other stakeholders. The tool will be used to evaluate a real campaign under development by the EU and as a demonstration for the design and implementation of a pan-European campaign aiming to support the implementation of new measures to improve road safety. The tool is aimed at identifying the necessary knowledge concerning the driver’s psychology as well as the needs in statistical data. It will make it possible to evaluate the impact of cultural diversity on the object and of the contents and nature of the campaigns. Next to the evaluation tool, CAST will develop a design tool for road safety campaigns based on existing research and new results produced in CAST. It will be a manual consisting of clear guidelines to design and implement a road safety campaign.
The CAST project is fundamentally oriented to support the need for effective road safety campaigns and the need for ready to use evaluation and design tools for fieldworkers. This will be achieved by applying the research results through validation and demonstration activities in several WP’s. The activities of the CAST project are divided into Research and Development activities, and Demonstration activities:
Research and Development activities
State of the art of the psychology of drivers and acceptability of measures aimed at enhancing road safety, i.e. studying and summarizing the underlying theoretical road user models;
- Inventory of evaluation methodologies for road safety campaigns in the EU and beyond;
- A powerful and innovative tool for fieldworkers and policy makers to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a single road safety campaign;
- A powerful and innovative tool for fieldworkers and policy makers to design and to implement road safety campaigns that are effective and cost-effective. This is actually a manual based on an up to date set of best practises regarding each step involved when designing and implementing campaigns (from conception over implementation to evaluation).
