Road Safety

DRIVE RESPONSIBLY

In 2008 “Drive responsibly” was carried out in Vidin, Montana, Vratsa, Sofia and Plovdiv, in 2009 – in Ruse, Veliko Tarnovo, Gabrovo, Sliven and Burgas. In 2010 the campaign was carried out in Targovishte, Razgrad, Shumen, Silistra and Dobrich. In 2011 we implemented a pilot action in Sofia and the campaign itself in Pleven, Ruse, Varna, Plovdiv and Stara Zagora. In each one we spent three days, using the time to build a local strategy for the events, to train local volunteers for the actions and to carry out the actions themselves. For the action days we used driving consoles, simulating risky situations on the road. Some of the volunteers worked with visitors. Others promoted the action in the city and disseminated promotional materials for the project and for the high technologies that we use for prevention.

High-tech applications proved very successful in our previous prevention actions. The driving simulator and the alcokart (for road safety) and our websites www.open-youth.org and www.youthforeurope.eu (for information dissemination) added incredible value for increasing the awareness of the young people on different issues. “Drive responsibly” 2010 built on that experience and was aimed at extending our good practice in the mobile phones domain. Based on the Belgium experience, we built a special prevention game to measure the level of alcohol in the blood, according to simple data, entered by the respective user. Using the game helped us increase alcohol abuse prevention of our actions, which was supported of increased involvement and strong team dimension of newly trained volunteers. In 2011 we introduced the concept of eco-driving. The last was visualized through a special software in our driving simulator and an eco-"black box" - a technology that is adapted to the vehicle itself.

As usual the citizens were able to participate free of charge and they had the opportunity to discuss their experience with the volunteers.