Best conference paper from North Brabant
In the session on road safety, Aisha Siahaija from North Brabant presented "Educating our most vulnerable: teens and adolescents" at the 2011 Polis conference. She presented an initiative from the province called “Totally Traffic” which provided a way for teenagers to learn about safe behaviour in traffic incorporated within their high school lessons.
The Province decided that they would like to target teenagers in order that they carried on safe behaviour once they left school, and because – as newly independent cyclists, pedestrians and public transport users – they tended to be within the most vulnerable groups of road traffic users. At the start of the project, discussion was held with schools as to how safe behaviour could be incorporated into existing lessons. As a result of this, the province developed a set of easily modifiable lessons for the schools called ‘Totally Traffic’. The initiative provides a useful and easily transferable method to educate future adults about safe transport behaviour.
Delivering a high degree of innovation, relevance and high quality work, Aisha Siahaija won the Eltis Award for the best conference paper, which was presented to her during the closing plenary.
The other finalists were:
- Pim Groll and Bram Munnik, Fourtress/reisinformatiegroup 9292: Multimodal driving with car and PT
- Bob Menzies, Cambridgeshire Transport: Cambridge, the guided system, now open for business
- Jo Baker, Mott MacDonald: Planning for accessibility in a real world
- Giuliano Mingardo, Erasmus University: Parking and urban mobility: an uneasy relationship?
Congratulations to the winner and runners up!