Saving lives with Design Thinking

A winner of the recent Excellence in Road Safety Awards demonstrated that - thanks to a little paint and some design thinking - motorcycle accidents can be reduced by 80%.

Changing behavior through road markings

Motorcycling is an exhilarating, efficient, cost-effective, and lower-emission form of transport. It can play an important role in multi-modal mobility. However, motorcycle riders are more vulnerable than other road users and exposed to more risk.

Research showed that on Austria’s winding roads, a?motorcyclist entering a?curve often cannot see what's happening on the other side of the bend. If the motorcyclist leans too close to the center of the road while taking a?curve, they might not have time to correct their path to oncoming traffic or - more frequently - overcompensate and leave the road. In fact, only 5% of riders entered a bend on a safe trajectory.

The Austrian Road Safety Board (KFV) sought to address this by exploiting the widespread (but incorrect) belief that road markings are slippery – and therefore avoided by riders. By painting shapes on the road curve, motorcyclists enter a bend safely. After experimenting with zig-zags and squares, ellipses were found to be the most effective.

The result?

Motorcycle injuries on the 19 hazardous curves in the study dropped by a staggering 80% thanks to the road markings. The human benefits are clear to see.

Believe it or not, there is also a quantifiable social cost to a motorcycle crash resulting in seriously injury. Apparently, avoiding one serious injury every 1,000 years would be enough to have a positive cost-benefit ratio to the installation of road markings on a curve.

Design Thinking

Sometimes the most efficient and effective solution is the least complicated. In the KFV case, simple road markings have the power to change ingrained behavior and deliver a profound safety benefit.

At Landmarks, we can’t claim to have saved any lives. But we do strive to be resource-efficient in providing solutions to our clients - shaping opinion along the way. It’s what we call Design Thinking.

More from KFV here: https://www.kfv.at/wenn-ellipsen-in-risikokurven-leben-retten/

Landmarks is a Brussels-based creative agency with a focus on business communications. With over two decades of creative experience, we provide simple and effective solutions to complex challenges.