Decreasing the road toll in Saudi Arabia : a quantitative and qualitative examination of campaign effectiveness within a culture of reckless bravado

This dissertation assesses the effectiveness of road safety campaigns (RSC) in Saudi Arabia and develops recommendations for their improvement. Statistics on Saudi road traffic accidents (RTAs) have been unpromising to date, with mounting numbers of RTA mortalities and rates of morbidity. Saudi authorities invest heavily in road safety infrastructure, but RSCs have proved to be ineffective in their outreach to the Saudi population, and ineffective in improving Saudi driving behaviours. Such proven ineffectiveness has highlighted the need for comparative research into successful Western RSCs that have achieved significant reductions in RTA rates. In this thesis, Australian, UK and Swedish RSCs are analysed and compared with Saudi RSCs in a search for weaknesses and gaps in Saudi RSC planning, implementation and evaluation. Based on this comparative analysis, weaknesses of Saudi RSCs are revealed, including the messages of campaigns, their appeal and their segmentation. These basic features were analysed in alignment with Shklovsky’s defamiliarisation theory, theories of planned action and reasoned behaviour and Aristotelian rhetoric. Case study data are complemented with a nationwide survey of Saudi drivers and an analysis of interviews with Saudi road traffic and safety authorities. The survey analysis revealed that risky driving is a complex phenomenon encompassing attitudes to risks on the roads and actual behaviours. Speeding was found to be the most frequent and pervasive high-risk behaviour, but it was also strongly correlated with the failure to wear a seat belt and the use of mobile phones when driving. Qualitative analysis with Leximancer also helped reveal the most problematic areas in Saudi RSC design, such as a lack of collaboration between different parties, a dominant racing culture, a disregard for road safety rules and the poor state of Saudi roads. Interview analysis also stressed the absence of a theoretical understanding of the ways in which planned behaviour changes may be achieved among Saudi drivers. As a result of the analysis for this study, the highest-risk driving behaviours in Saudi Arabia are identified, success factors for RSC design are ascertained and recommendations for RSC improvements are developed. The findings and implications of this research are discussed in the final sections of the thesis