According to an STN survey conducted a year ago, approximately 7 out of 10 readers hail from what they consider to be rural areas across the county. When it comes to any form of transportation, especially the student variety, rural highways and roads can prove to be very tricky.
The 2011 National Summit for Rural Traffic Safety Culture scheduled for July 11-13 in Big Sky, Mont., and hosted by will provide attendees with opportunities to learn more about the positive community norms model, a new approach to cultivating community cultures around health and safety issues that was founded in 2009 by Jeffrey Linkenbach, a senior research scientist in the Department of Health & Human Development at Montana State University.
PCN is a community (or environmental) transformational approach that engages many different audiences throughout the community for the purpose of improving health and safety. PCN integrates leadership, positive norms communication and prevention portfolio integration across the social ecology to improve health and safety.
The theme for the summit is “Telling a New Prevention Story.” What could the school transportation industry learn or share with the rest of the highway safety community on how rural areas present unique challenges such as dangerous walk routes? What about long school bus rides that can exceed an hour because of the mileage that must be traveled from home to school and back? How can school transportation help solve them?
The event in sponsored by Montana State University, AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the Transportation Research Board.
