Resilience and youth road safety: some thoughts

A presentation was given at the recent Australasian College of Road Safety Conference 2016, introducing young driver road safety issues and the potential role of resilience education as a countermeasure. The session was the Road Safety Educators workshop, not only held on the first morning of the conference, but with an hour earlier start time than the rest of the program. The workshop was full, with standing room only for most of the morning, reflecting the breadth of interest from a wide range of educators and wider stakeholders.

Introducing youth road safety statistics, one focus was on road crashes as a persistent leafing cause of death and acquired disability for youth, as well as the persistent over-representation of youth, and young drivers in particular, in fatal crashes (BITRE, 2016; AIHW, 2016). This is not only true in Australasia, but echoed globally (WHO, 2015). Moreover increased attention to non-fatal injury outcomes suggests we have achieved little change in youth crash-related serious injuries in recent years (AIHW, 2015p Centre for Road Safety, 2016). The 388 deaths in Australia and New Zealand involving young drivers and motorcyclists in 2014 (latest data available BITRE, 2016; Ministry of Transport, 2015), are coupled with thousands of serious injuries (AIHW, 2015; Ministry of Transport, 2015); beyond what should be considered an acceptable trade-off for mobility, for any road user group.