The Road Safety Monitor: Public Awareness and Concern about Road Safety

The Road Safety Monitor is an annual public opinion survey developed by the Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) to take the pulse of the nation on key road safety issues. The survey examines: (1) what Canadians see as priority road safety issues and how concerned they are about them; (2) their views about how to deal with these problems; (3) what they know and don’t know about safe driving practices; and (4) how they behave on the highways. The TIRF Road Safety Monitor includes a core set of questions that are asked each year to provide information on trends in attitudes, opinions and behaviours. This is supplemented by a set of questions that probe more deeply into special, topical, and emerging issues. This fifth edition of the TIRF Road Safety Monitor contained 75 items designed to probe the knowledge, attitudes, and concerns of Canadians with respect to a range of road safety issues and to obtain information on their driving practices. The survey required an average of approximately 14 minutes to complete. It was administered by telephone to a random sample of Canadian drivers, by Opinion Search Inc. in September, 2005. A total of 1,218 drivers completed the interview. The data were weighted to ensure the results were representative of the national population. Based on a sample of this size, the results can be considered accurate within 2.8%, 19 times out of 20 (most conservative estimate). The present report focuses on public awareness and concerns about road safety.