In any other case, the implications would certainly be deadly. One such deadly accident came about final week on the Bharathapuzha bridge close to Shoranur Junction railway station in Kerala. 4 contract labourers employed for cleansing railway tracks have been hit by an oncoming prepare on this bridge.
With railway strains criss-crossing the size and breadth of India, observe trespasser deaths are a day by day incidence in India. In line with experiences, in 2023, there have been as many as 1,357 deaths on railway tracks in Kerala alone.
There was a 32% improve in such deaths over the 2022 toll. One is perhaps tempted to show a blind eye in direction of this drawback as these fatalities happen due to an criminal activity: trespassing on railway property.
However the fact is that because the inhabitants density round railway tracks will increase, individuals spilling onto these strains turns into an inevitability. So, trespasser deaths will proceed to rise in India. What could be accomplished at the least to mitigate this mortality?
I’ve had the fortune of interacting with many officers of the Indian Railways who have been very eager to mitigate the issue of trespassing accidents on railway tracks. This gave me a possibility to review the issue of trespassing in depth.
A railway observe is unambiguously an unsafe place. A observe on a bridge throughout a river is an much more harmful path to stroll on. No person wants coaching classes to be made conscious of this apparent truth. However the issue with the human mind is that consciousness doesn’t all the time mechanically translate to acceptable motion.
The era of the best behaviour is contingent on acceptable stimuli being deployed on the proper time to set off that behaviour. And the perfect place to affect any specific human behaviour is on the actual spot the place that behaviour takes place.
Security signage is the perfect media choice out there at a trespassing location to offer an acceptable stimulus. Proper now, the one signage that an individual sees earlier than getting into a railway river bridge is a retro-reflective board with the identify of the river written in English and the native language.
Immediately’s highway indicators are similar to people who have been first put in in Detroit manner again in 1915. These outdated security indicators are removed from efficient in triggering secure behaviour amongst individuals getting into unsafe environments.
There may be one other human behaviour complexity one ought to consider whereas making an attempt to advertise security behaviours. In any one who frequently indulges in dangerous behaviour, the regularity of that behaviour reduces the sensation of threat connected to that harmful exercise.
This discount in threat perceptions can be what makes skilled employees extra liable to unsafe behaviour at work. So, a contract employee who works frequently on railway tracks is extra vulnerable to a trespassing accident than an individual crossing the identical railway observe for the primary time.
What’s the finest antidote to the human tendency to bask in varied unsafe behaviours? The emotion of concern. This emotion has in all probability saved much more human lives than all of recent drugs put collectively. However how can we successfully use this emotion? Will depicting loss of life, as proven in cigarette packaging, work?
No, it won’t. As a result of the human mind is created to disclaim loss of life. None of us has skilled our personal loss of life even in our goals. So, each time we see a picture of loss of life, it’s taken as one thing that occurs to different individuals. Depictions of loss of life don’t make people extra receptive to warnings.
However once we see the fearful expression of one other human, and even an animal, we instantly know there’s some form of hazard lurking round.
This transmission of concern from one individual to a different is finished by way of a set of neurons in our mind known as mirror neurons. It’s mirror neurons that course of different’s concern alerts and in flip transmit their fears to us.
However how can we convert this human-to-human concern transmission right into a scalable proposition? The reply lies in using images. They don’t seem to be as efficient because the sight of an precise human’s fearful face, however are second finest.
Immediately, most signage used for public communication is graphic in nature. If photographic pictures might substitute these graphic pictures in all security signage, the emotion of concern may very well be successfully communicated at scale.
The security signage could be made much more efficient if the picture deployed helps an individual anticipate the implications of a dangerous determination earlier than it’s made.
Immediately, just one signal is often put in at a spot. However a research of efficient communication methods utilized by political events and arranged religions exhibits that repetition is an integral a part of their communication. So, if the signage is repeated, particularly in life and loss of life conditions, it will go a good distance in bettering its effectiveness.
A whole lot of deaths happen on daily basis on Indian roads, railway tracks and building websites. Though it’s recognized that a lot human behaviour could be modified and plenty of human lives saved with efficient security signage, little or no thought has been given thus far to redoing these indicators. What number of extra lives should be misplaced earlier than we deploy modern-day intelligence to revamp our century-old public security signage?
