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PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION
The states comprising
the area served by Region 8 of the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA) include Colorado, Montana, North Dakota,
South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. These six states each encompass
large land areas, are relatively sparsely populated, and, with
a few exceptions, are essentially rural. The NHTSA Region 8 states
were challenged by the Presidential Initiative to Increase
Seat Belt Use Nationwide to devise a method of reaching the
goals of the Seat Belt Initiative, given the unique composition
of their residents.
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
The goal of the program,
Highway Safety Radio Network (HSRN), was to reduce fatalities
and injuries in the Region 8 states through the proper use of
seat belts and child safety seats. Objectives of the effort were
to:
- Create a seat belt
use program for all six Region 8 states
- Tailor the seat belt
use program to address the unique needs of a largely rural population
- Develop strong public-private
partnerships among key participants
- Devise a public education
plan to increase awareness of seat belt use
STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
The effort to implement
a buckle-up program in the Region 8 states was launched as a
partnership among the NHTSA Region 8 Office, the Colorado Office
of Transportation Safety, and each State Highway Patrol agency.
The partnership developed an implementation strategy which closely
paralleled the national strategy's four elements: building public-private
partnerships; enacting strong legislation; embracing active,
high visibility law enforcement; and conducting well-coordinated,
effective public education. Activities associated with this strategy
included:
- Broadening the membership
of the partnership to include the Colonel of each State Highway
Patrol, emergency room physicians, victims of motor vehicle crashes,
a Federal Highway Administration engineer, officers of large
trucking companies and individual members of the NHTSA Region
8 staff
- Developing a public
education program using the only media readily and easily accessible
to the largely rural population of the region—radio. The
NHTSA Region 8 Office produced two half-hour radio programs relating
to traffic safety, featuring the Colonel of each State Highway
Patrol. The radio programs included dialogues by emergency room
physicians, crash victims, and others who testified about the
benefits to a rural population, of wearing seat belts and the
results of failing to buckle-up
- Scheduling the State
Police Colonels for question-and-answer-format programs, in which
the Colonels responded to questions from listeners
- Producing a set of
24 live announcer tag lines for repeated use as filler material
by radio stations
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