KRASH Origins: ideas

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.