Guest: Tom Flood

Key Takeaways

• The central problem is the way road danger is talked about. Current framing often minimizes car dominance, shifts blame to vulnerable road users, and normalizes an unsafe system.
• Cities do not just need safer streets; they need better communication about what streets are for, who they are for, and who is being harmed by the current system.

Summary

1. Road safety messaging is often weak:
   • • The dominant narrative has been built around driver convenience, risk normalization, and pedestrian blame.
     • Automotive marketing is emotionally powerful and often normalizes recklessness, big vehicles, and street dominance.
     • Safety messaging for people outside cars often does the opposite: it blames pedestrians, tells children to protect themselves, and uses weak or forgettable public campaigns.
2. Cities and advocates should stop treating communications as an afterthought and instead use it as part of the road safety strategy itself.
   • • It is possible to move from generic safety messaging to sharper, more human, and more persuasive public narratives by reshaping public understanding of road safety and active transportation.
     • Advocacy can alter what people consider normal, acceptable, or radical. Wanting children to walk to school safely is not radical; accepting road violence is.
     • An effective approach is to use messaging that is:
       • emotionally direct,
       • simple,
       • human-centered, and
       • aimed at mainstream audiences rather than already-convinced advocates.

How can Cities apply these learnings?

1. Reframe road safety as road violence prevention, not just traffic management:
   • • Review existing safety campaigns, police messaging, and municipal communications for blame language, moralizing, and false equivalence.
     • Replace “be careful” and “share the road” style messaging with language that names systemic responsibility and infrastructure failure.
2. Develop simple, emotionally strong materials that are easy for mainstream audiences to understand:
   • • Different messages are needed for parents, drivers, elected officials, school communities, and the general public.
     • Posters, short videos, billboards, social posts, stickers, and site-specific signage can be more effective than dense technical communication.
3. Create public-facing campaigns that show the ordinary absurdity of current street conditions.
   • • Use real stories and the faces of victims to ensure the issue is not abstracted into statistics alone.

Ideas for future research

1. Study how people interpret terms like “road violence,” “road safety,” “safe streets,” and “active transportation” across different political and cultural contexts.
2. Evaluate whether child-centered messaging increases support for street redesign more than general safety messaging.