Baseline Research Program: Detailed analysis of community surveys on perception of Victoria’s road safety camera program

The aim of this report was to provide a more detailed analysis of the Office of the Road Safety Camera Commissioner (ORSCC) community surveys originally conducted by EY Sweeney to guide future strategies aimed at improving community confidence and driver compliance in Road Safety Cameras (RSCs). Four key questions were: 1. Which self-reported attitudes or behaviours identified as changing over the time are most strongly associated with road safety outcomes? 2. How does public awareness and understanding of the road safety cameras influence behaviour change and confidence in the road safety camera system? 3. Do road-related environmental factors affect the perception and performance of road safety cameras? 4. Does increased public awareness of the camera programs impact their effectiveness? Data & methods. Participants were adult Victorian residents, recruited by an online panel provider to conduct a 15 minute online survey interview. Self-report response data was provided to MUARC for each of three waves of the survey (2017, 2020, 2023). Each survey dataset contained a sample of ~1,200 responses from separate cohorts of participants. Data was weighted to a recent ABS census for gender, age and location. Three separate analyses were conducted using a multivariate binary logistic regression. Results: Driver awareness, attitudes and behaviour (analysis #1): Two factors were found to be associated with a road safety outcome while also showing evidence of change over time: 1) Higher frequency of speeding and then slowing down when a camera is seen, which showed lower prevalence for Surveys 2 (2020) and 3 (2023) cf. Survey 1 (2017). The high overall proportion reporting higher frequency of speeding suggests that there remains significant scope to reduce this behaviour further. 2) Opposition to lowering speed limits was negatively associated with crash outcome, and the proportion that were opposed was less at Survey 2 (2020) cf. both Survey 1 (2017) and Survey 3 (2023), noting these differences may have been related to COVID lockdown periods. Driver understanding and awareness of RSCs and the road environment (analysis #2): Males, and those in youngest age group (18-29) were more likely to report lower perceived effectiveness RSCs and were more likely to report a high frequency of speeding behaviour.. While both a higher perceived consistency of speed signage and higher perceived predictability of speed limits were each associated with higher confidence in road safety cameras, those reporting a higher predictability of speed limits were also more likely to report a higher frequency of speeding. Behaviour change amongst those who received a speed camera fine (analysis #3): A significantly higher prevalence of drivers reported positive behaviour change after receiving a camera speeding fine at Survey 3 (cf. Surveys 1 & 2). However, the prevalence of self-reported positive behaviour change after receiving a camera speeding fine remained below 50%.,