‘Choose Your Way’ is an interesting research initiative focused a fundamental understanding of human behaviour in relation to young people. The project was undertaken with young people and included a range of road safety activities to gauge young people’s opinion of an improved road safety situation and what this would look like. The results show that in Bulgaria, the short and long term solutions differed illustrating that road safety is a multi-faceted problem with numerous solutions in a given time and place.
Nearly one third of Bulgarians believe the fines for road rule violations to be too low. This result is derived from the study held within the “Choose Your Way” campaign. The study involved 915 people. 32% of respondents indicated “increasing fines” as a means to improve the situation on Bulgarian roads in the short term. “Road improvements” follow by 17%, “reduction of corruption among police officers” by 16%, “preventive information campaigns” by 15% and “rewriting the laws” by 14%.
As a long-term solution, fines are ranked third with 19%, following “rewrite the laws” by 21% and “preventive campaigns” by 20%. “Road improvements” and ” reduction of corruption among police officers” retain their relative weight.
82% of respondents gave a positive response to the “Choose your way” campaign as a whole, which completely coincides with results of similar studies of the “Open Youth” on the effects of prevention campaigns.
The campaign itself was implemented by “Open Youth” in the period from 7 September to 6 October 2011 and in ten large cities: Sofia (09 September), Pernik (12 September), Vidin (15 September), Montana (18 September), Vratsa (21 September), Blagoevgrad (24 September), Kyustendil (27 September), Pazardjik (30 September), Kardjali (03 October) and Haskovo (06 October). During the campaign 110 volunteers were trained to carry it out for their local community. They helped our message to reach 1964 people through the alcogoggles and 696 through the driving simulator.
Detailed information on cities is given below.
“Choose Your Way” aims to inform the young people in Bulgaria, how they can improve their quality of life and the atmosphere in the local community by organizing preventive voluntary initiatives, aimed at reducing alcohol abuse, drug use, driving risks and risk of AIDS. Through the campaign will be presented an example of such socially useful activity directed at reducing alcohol abuse and subsequent driving. Within this activity, participants can use free of charge:
- alco-simulator that will visualize personal results of simulated sober driving and of one under the influence of alcohol;
- alcogoggles that simulate human behavior under the influence of alcohol with different concentration of the alcohol in the blood (e.g. between 0.7 and 1 promiles, between 1.2 and 1.5 promiles, and between 1.7 and 2 promiles).
Within the campaign, for the first time in Bulgaria, citizens can see themselves how they will look after computer-simulated accident resulting from alcohol abuse, called “Fatal Reflections”. The last generates customized multimedia presentation in the form of news involving a group of actors whose digital photos were taken and they were given roles in an accident with a vehicle. The simulation creates a “top” story, which describes the incident as a result of alcohol abuse and puts participants in the center of the situation. The result engages the audience in a discussion about the real consequences of alcohol abuse.
“ChooseYour Way” is part of the “Open Youth” project “Volunteer! … through road safety”, which is the only approved project for Bulgaria within the European Union initiative “European Year of Volunteering 2011”. Details of the entire project can be found at http://roadsafetyvolunteers.open-youth.org
More information with detailed respondent results can be found here.