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It’s now over seven months since the changes to the Highway Code, aimed at protecting vulnerable road users, came into force (I know, where has the year gone?).
Almost two months have passed since the government launched its latest THINK! road safety campaign to promote the revisions. The ‘Travel Like You Know Them’ campaign, billed as a summer-long publicity push, aimed to not only make people aware of the Highway Code changes but to shift the focus from vehicles on the road to the actual people making those journeys.
“’Travel Like You Know Them’ speaks to everyone who uses the road, with an emphasis on motorists and those who have a greater responsibility to reduce the risk they may pose to others, as per Highway Code’s new hierarchy of road users,” the Department for Transport said in July.
The DfT’s £500,000 publicity campaign followed criticism of the government’s roll-out of the Highway Code changes, with many arguing that the public were not made aware of the revisions and their new responsibilities on the road.
An AA poll carried out just days before the changes came into effect in late January showed that one-in-three of the motoring group’s members were unaware of the new rules.
So, seven months has passed and what’s changed?
Not much, if you’re looking at a new survey conducted by the AA.
Of the 13,327 AA members who took the group’s latest poll on the new Highway Code, 8,090 (61 percent) had not read the revisions.
6,972 drivers said that they had heard about the new rules, but just hadn’t read them yet (it has only been seven months after all), while 1,118 motorists were completely unaware of the changes.
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On the bright side, even if over three-fifths of the AA’s members haven’t read the changes, when asked to pick five correct statements from the new Highway Code from a list of ten, the majority of those surveyed answered correctly. Phew.
Tim Rankin, the managing director of AA Accident Assist, told the BBC that the group was “concerned that so many still haven’t read the rules.”
He continued: “While we are pleased that many of the changes can be successfully recalled, we’d like more drivers to know the rules outright so they can keep themselves and others safe.
“It is in everyone’s interest to take every measure that helps avoid collisions and remove confusion from the road, so we urge those that still haven’t read the updated code to do so as soon as possible.”
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