The road safety campaign billboards along State Highway 2 from Te Maunga to Paengaroa have been updated with a new, more animated kiwifruit character.
As well as a new set of messages, the updated billboards see the kiwifruit character come alive and ‘speak’ to passing road users with the help of speech bubbles.
Campaign messages and target audiences have also been expanded. Messages such as “I share the road” aimed at truck drivers and “New drivers - take extra care” targeted at new drivers have been added. Old favourites such as “Safety belts save lives” have also been translated to the new animated campaign.
Targeting driver behaviour is one strategy in the government’s Safer Journeys/Safe System approach. The four pillars of the system are; safe road use, safe vehicles, safe speeds, and safe roads and roadsides.
The campaign is funded by the NZ Transport Agency and local councils, and managed by the Joint Road Safety Committee.
ENDS
Note to editors:
The new topics have been added as a result of findings in the NZTA’s Communities at risk register.
The register ranks communities by local authority catchment on 13 areas affecting road safety.
It reports although drivers aged 15 to 19 years old make up only 6.5% of all licence holders, they were at fault in 17% of all fatal and serious injury crashes in the Western Bay of Plenty District. This ranks the Western Bay of Plenty District 38th out of 72 local authority catchments for this crash factor.
A truck was involved in 15% of all fatal and serious crashes in the Western Bay of Plenty (national average = 10.7%, making the Western Bay of Plenty 11th out of 72).
The Western Bay of Plenty District and Tauranga City are equal first worst across the country for the level of unrestrained children in vehicles. With the national average sitting at 9%, the risk register notes 25% of children in the Western Bay and Tauranga were found to be unrestrained.
