Even with the rapid technological advancement, it is a sad truth that your children are not safe on the road. Your child may sometimes get lost or severely injured in the heavy traffic existing today. Road accidents or injuries may result in endless suffering and grief; and ultimately leading to economic destitution for the concerned families and friends.
Often, students become the victim of this man-made disaster. As a responsible citizen, it is your responsibility to make genuine efforts for student road safety. Safer roads for all, means safer roads for your children.
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10 Important Points on Student Road Safety and Suggestion for Improvements
Here are the ten strategies that keep your children safe on the road:
1. Keep your Vehicle Speed under Control
Speed is the major reason for every road related accidents and injuries. Overspeed of vehicles near the school area can put student road safety at risk. The following are certain strategies that help to reduce vehicle speed:
- You can set and enforce speed limits suitable for each road type
- When there are more pedestrians on the road, you can try to drive your vehicle at a speed of 30km/hr
- By using automatic speed cameras, you will be able to set speed limits
- Improving roads by using features such as traffic lights, speed bumps, signboards etc. helps you to limit the vehicle speed
2. Avoid Drinking and Driving
When you drink and drive, remember that you are posing a huge safety risk on your children as pedestrians, cyclists or passengers. Alcohol consumption can usher into road crash, injury, or even death. When blood alcohol concentration(BAC) is above 0.04 g/dl, risk of crashes also rises abnormally.
- Some of the strategies that can be employed to avoid drinking and driving are as follows:
- You can set separate BAC limit for young drivers as well as older drivers. For young drivers, you can set 0.02 g/dl and for older drivers, it should be 0.05 g/dl
- By sobriety checkpoints and breath testing, you will be able to enforce drinking and driving laws
- You will be able to control the sale of alcohol by putting a minimum purchase age and adjusting their hours of operation
- Restrict the marketing of alcohol to children
3. Making Use of Helmets while Riding a Two-Wheeler
In order to reduce the risk of head injuries in accidents, you can advise your children to wear a helmet whenever they start off a journey in two-wheelers. It was found in a survey that use of helmets:
- can help you to reduce head injuries by 69%
- prevent death by 40%
- will help you to reduce risk of serious head injury by more than 70%
Here follows some strategies which will help you to promote the usage of helmets at the time of riding a two wheeler:
Directing and imposing motorcycle helmet laws
- You will be able to provide standards for the manufacture of a helmet and give more priority for kids' helmets
- Ensure accessibility and affordability of helmets to those who need them
- You can take initiatives like distributing free or discounted helmets to those children who cannot afford them
4. Curbing Children in Vehicles
Restraints can prevent your children from serious injuries caused by crashes. Some of the examples of restraints include booster seats, common seat belts, infant car seats, and child car seats. These are installed on the basis of age, weight, and height of your child. Booster seats can reduce 59% of injuries caused due to road traffic crashes.
The following are certain strategies you can adopt to increase the usage of restraints:
- You can make child restraints laws, mandatory for all private vehicles
- Standardization of child restraint manufacture
- Make child restraints available and reasonable for all those who need them
- To assure safety of your children, you can persuade manufacturers to have plug-in attachments
- Awareness classes can be conducted regarding the use of restraints and to promote child restraint loan schemes
5. Improving Visibility of Children
Seeing and being seen is very important to road safety, especially, in the case of children, who are more unsafe than elders.
Some of the strategies given below will help to improve visibility of your children:
- Make your children wear bright clothes when they are out on the road
- Advise your children to always accompany adult people
- You can make use of headlamps along with front, rear, and wheel reflectors
- Improve street lighting
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6. Ameliorating Road Infrastructure
By modifying and building new road infrastructure, you will be able to improve student road safety and reduce the risk of accidents.
Here follows certain strategies you can follow to improve road infrastructure:
- Traffic lights, speed humps, zebra crossings, street lighting, flyovers, etc. are some of the essential measures you can espouse for improving road infrastructure
- Certain mechanisms such as raised platforms for ramblers, lanes specially made for pedestrians and cyclists, construction of median barriers etc. can be implemented for improved road infrastructure
- You can make car free areas for enhancing the safety of pedestrians
- Launch school safety zones
- For superior safety of your children, select play zones away from road
- Financing for safe public transport to ensure your child's safety
7. Altering Vehicle Design
Vehicle designs have a substantial role to play in guaranteeing student road safety. Most of the vehicle safety measures have the potential to safeguard your children.
Certain strategies you can follow in vehicle design that directly contribute to student road safety include:
- Compulsory installation of energy absorbing crumple zones in your vehicles
- Reconstruction of your vehicle fronts to make it more “pedestrian friendly”
- Installation of the alcohol interlock system to prevent drinking habit of drivers. Mounting alarms and cameras inside the bus for monitoring your children constantly
8. Minimizing Risks for Young Drivers
Young drivers are a major reason for most of the crashes. Rash driving, carelessness, and alcohol consumption can hinder your child's safety. The following strategies can have a remarkable impact on the safety of your children:
- Reducing BAC levels for young drivers
- You can designate an adult driver to teach young drivers
- Strictly tell them not to go for night time driving
- Warn them that you will not tolerate any criminal offense or bad habits
9. Proffering Genuine care for Injured Children
Providing right emergency care and recovery services at the right time is the first step you have to take for improving road safety of children. Some of the strategies by which you can improve the care of injured children are given below:
- Impart education to teachers as well as caretakers to take immediate care and
- facilitate transportation services to those children who are injured
- Training hospital authorities to deliver basic treatment needs for injured children
- Equipping emergency vehicles with adequate medical facilities and supplies
- Making a hospital as child-friendly as possible
- Enhancing access to counselling services for directing your children at the time of injury
10. Administering Children around Roads
As you know, young children will not have the ability to evaluate risk awaiting them. You have a great role to play in guiding children around roads. They should be aware of what is happening around them. Appropriate guidance can avoid the chance of causing accidents to your children.
̋ The future of a country is its young people. We cannot afford to lose our children to road traffic crashesˮ
It is possible to avert road related accidents and injuries. Mostly students become the victims as they have little awareness regarding road safety. Thus, it is each of your responsibility to protect students and give them appropriate guidance at the right time.
