This
work shows what 9th and 10th grade found about how to describe people's
perception of cultural issues on our mobility situations, while working
on a campaign to show that being safe on the roads is an act of
self-responsibility. This post is corresponding to the report we sent to
the international contest “Your Ideas Your Initiatives” hosted by
Renault.
Along
several classes, we discussed about how our mindset affects the
decisions we make in terms of our behavior on the roads: how fast to go
on a school area, when to cross the street (no matter if the traffic
light is red for pedestrians), why to reply a text message while driving
on a highway, etc. During the discussion, we said that our mindset
could affect the way we perceive our actions, no matter what information
we have around, in order to reduce the effect of our actions on the
possible situations on a chaotic road (at least in our minds); in other
words, we think about ourselves as victims, not as responsible people,
so every situation (incident or accident) becomes a hard situation in
which a solution is far away.
One
of the ideas was to evaluate how critic is the situation in terms of
the way people think: to do so, a survey was designed using questions
about age, residence area, mobility area, transportation ways, reactions
when a situation on the road is given, and perception about how
responsible are the different agents of mobility in the city, especially
in three areas: El Poblado, Laureles and the Downtown (these are the
most important areas in terms of people's mobility).
We
found that people have a bad perception of authority institutions
related to mobility control and security assistance (National Police and
Road Security Agents), saying that they are not doing their job of
protecting people and assuring a safe road structure, but at the same
time, a part of them want to be "forgiven" when they make a mistake in
terms of affecting the security of drivers and pedestrians. Therefore,
it is possible to say that our mindset is ready to judge others' actions
and attitudes without mercy, but is soft to evaluate our own mistakes
and misconceptions, so there is no coherence in our thoughts and our
actions, which reduces any possibility of having a proper road culture.