EFFECTS OF ROAD USER EDUCATION ON ROAD TRAFFIC CRASHES IN NIGERIA

Abstract

  Transportation on road garners enormous benefits but without strict managerial measures, its attendant externalities impose on its benefits. Consequently, the trend of Road Traffic Crashes in Nigeria for the last decade and the resulting death toll on Nigerian roads has raised significant concerns among the government and people. These crashes not only consume lives and property but also lead to grief, dashed hopes, and high healthcare expenses. Therefore, this study is set out to examine the effects of road user education on road traffic crashes in Ondo state, Nigeria. This study adopted the survey research design. It relied on both primary and secondary sources of data and the study population comprises of commercial vehicle drivers, company vehicle drivers, staff of Federal Road Safety Corps and other stakeholders in Ondo State, Nigeria. The result reveals that almost 60% of the respondents agree that the use of print media by the FRSC to educate and enlighten road users had been effective while 20.9% disagree. Print media involves the use of like handbills, fliers, billboards, e.t.c. Regarding the use of electronic media, 62.2% of the respondents agree that the use of electronic media (e.g social media, television and radio) has been effective, 18.4% of the respondents disagree to this. An Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was performed with varimax rotation using the principal axis factoring to extract the factors. The minimum factor loading criteria was set to 0.50. The communality of the scale, which indicates the amount of variance in each dimension, was also assessed to ensure acceptable levels of explanation. The results in table 3 show that all communalities were over 0.40, which is within the acceptable range of 0.30. It was concluded that the most represented road users were the motorable road users in this study, The trend of RTC cases, deaths and injuries revealed a sustained reduction from 2014-2018 and a sustained increase from 2018-2022. It was recommended that the FRSC should focus on other effective programs, such as motorized rallies, while the child advocacy scheme can be scaled up to reach more road users Keywords: Transportation, road traffic crashes, education, Federal Road Safety Corps, road user