Safer Roads Through Community Partnerships ? Recent Experience In Tasmania.

Since 2003 Tasmania?s Department of Infrastructure, Energy and Resources (DIER) has
introduced a new Community Road Safety Partnerships (CRSP) Program. The aim of CRSP
is to develop partnerships with local government authorities and associated community networks to improve road safety at a local community level. DIER recognised that community road safety was becoming an accepted part of good practice, as documented in an Austroads review of programs in Australia and New Zealand (Cairney 2002), and that these programs delivered worthwhile benefits.
CRSP links with existing community networks, such as local road safety groups and community safety organisations. It is all about ?grass roots? community development processes supporting communities to implement their own informed locally-based solutions to road safety issues. Sustainability of programs has been at the forefront of all CRSP initiatives, along with a strong focus on evaluation.
ARRB Consulting conducted a major independent evaluation of the CRSP program in August
2005. The framework for good practice in the Austroads report was used as the framework for
the evaluation. CRSP evaluated well on all the major aspects covered ? institutional arrangements were well catered for through the partnership of DIER and local government; integration of activities on a geographical basis and in terms of single actions to deal with multiple problems was evident; community visits and the extent of media coverage provided evidence of an informed community; the extent of local government input and local industry sponsorship attested to the mobilisation of local resources; and the existence of a road safety plan for each committee encouraged priority for effective actions. Evaluation reports for four activities were examined in detail and found to compare well with reports from other community road safety programs.
This presentation discusses what has been learned about the developing road safety partnerships in the first years of operation and the major findings of the 2005 CRSP Evaluation It also shares the plans to incorporate new local government partners in the future.