Six years old children and crossing of roads. Results of a training experimet

The health risk of children in traffic has changed little during the last 10 to 15 years. To reduce the risk, more extensive and new countermeasures are needed. Children at early school age are mainly involved in road accidents as pedestrians and in particular when crossing the road. This report describes and presents the results from an experiment of training six-year-olds. The age for starting school in Norway is 6 years. For training, a model representing various traffic environments was used. The effectiveness of training was measured by comparing the performance on a before test and an after test in real traffic using a test group and a control group. The results show that training improved the children’s ability to select safe spots for crossing the road.