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Abstract
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Where are they going, the couple on the motorbike that adorns this issue’s cover? Somewhere exciting, no doubt, and at great speed, with the wind billowing through the man’s scarf and the woman’s hair. They are young and free, making the most of 1960s Britain, about to roar past the viewer and off into the distance. Wherever they are going, this 1969 road safety poster tells us, they are getting there safely—because they are wearing their safety helmets (see article for fig. 1).
This image is a fitting one for the cover of a special issue devoted to the international history of road safety, not least because safety education—using persuasive methods to try to convince people to change their behavior and act more safely—has been deployed for over 100 years and has reached virtually every nation in the world. It represents a particular approach to road safety, though by no means the only one; engineering, training, and enforcement solutions often run alongside educative campaigns. Yet as artifacts, road safety education materials like this poster tell us a lot about prevalent perceptions of danger and people’s interactions with automotive technologies, and about responsibilities for managing risks in everyday life. How should dangers posed by particular technologies be addressed? Who should be responsible for protecting individuals? What role, if any, should the state play?
In Britain, the educative approach to preventing deaths and injuries was well established by 1969. Drawing on the American “Safety First” movement, safety education was introduced into the workplace by the railway industry in 1913. It soon spread across other industries and other areas of society—chiefly road safety, from 1917, but also home safety after 1930. A huge range of methods were used: posters, booklets, films, songs, exhibitions, children’s games, safety quizzes and competitions, “safety weeks,” staged crashes to raise awareness, talks, and messages printed on bookmarks, cigarette cards, milk bottle tops, and even on Christmas wrapping paper and bars of soap. Hundreds of millions of items have been produced and disseminated over the last 100 years in Britain alone, making safety education a massively significant sociocultural phenomenon....
Language: en |