Every year, road crash statistics record around 1.3 million deaths globally. More than 50% of those victims where young adults of ages ranging between 15 and 44 and of whom 30% where under 25. In addition to those are another 50 million that are injured as well. These unfortunate accidents lead to significant costs that amount to $ 518 billion globally every year. To put this incredible sum of money into scale, we should point out that this is roughly 2% of a certain individual countries’ annual GDPs. A cost that becomes a burden in for many developing countries.
The main causes of car crashes can be placed in three broad categories. Those being: speeding, reckless driving, texting & driving. Statistics show that the risk of involvement in a casualty doubles with each 5km/hr increase in free travelling speed above 60km/hr. Thus, the first way to go about reducing those casualties would be to somehow force people to abide by traffic laws and adopt safe driving. So, the question is: how can do this? How can we promote safe driving?
The approach that we decided to take here is to incentivize it. First, we chose our target population to be the millennials (age group 18-34) and that is specifically because they are some of the highest contributors to the driving mortality rates and are the key age demographic for online commerce spending more money online in a given year than any other age group. Accordingly, we decided to make use of the above relationship in an innovative way to help promote urban safety through promoting safer driving habits.
Work produced in collaboration with Omar Farroukh at Harvard Graduate school of Design (2017)