Road safety partnerships
Encounter Youth and Schoolies Festival
In 1999, Encounter Youth began coordinating a community response to encourage school leavers to party safely in the Victor Harbor community. Twenty years on, Schoolies Festival™ is widely recognised as the safest and most successful ‘schoolies’ management strategy in the country and SAPOL is proud to become a principal partner of the 2019 festival as an extension of our Safer Journeys program.
SAPOL has been involved with Schoolies Festival for many years now not only in an operational capacity but directly interacting with participants in a fun and engaging way on personal safety, crime prevention and road safety. This year, SAPOL is extending our involvement by helping to ensure everyone has a Safer Journey by funding the Free Schoolies Festival Bus Service. This road safety strategy provides safe transportation for participants, keeping them safe on our roads. For more information visit the Encounter Youth – Schoolies Festival™ website.
Enough is enough
SA Police and The Advertiser are drawing a line in the sand and have launched a new road safety campaign to drive home the message that ‘Enough is enough’ when it comes to the trauma on our roads. The targeted media partnership aims to encourage greater community buy in to the need for safe driving behaviours and vigilance.
The new strategy has been driven by the current road statistics and the feelings of the general community, media, government, other government agencies and police who have simply had enough of recidivist, deliberate, irresponsible and negligent driving, and a general malaise of complacency on the roads.
There must now be a ‘line drawn in the sand’ and we must say ENOUGH is ENOUGH particularly from a policing and compliance perspective.
The second part of the campaign tagline of Zero is possible reflects the State Government's Towards Zero Together strategy and has multiple uses. We should all be working towards:
- ZERO crashes
- ZERO lives lost
- ZERO serious injuries
- ZERO drivers dicing with the Fatal 5
- ZERO dangerous drivers.
Any life lost or affected by road trauma is one too many. We want to move the commentary from simply a statistical number that people have become desensitised to, and focus the conversation more on the human toll and impact of road trauma – the lives lost, the family and friends left behind; the survivors and their critical care networks; the emergency services and support personnel. To make it more real. To make an impression. To make a difference.
Over the coming months, the campaign with The Advertiser will provide SA Police with a channel to have regular features both in print and online to tell the human stories; reinforce critical road safety messages; and promote our road safety education and enforcement activities.
We all have a part to play and road safety is everyone’s responsibility. We cannot keep seeing people lose their lives on our roads – or being the victim of a serious injury. Enough is enough!
Read article from The Advertiser