The City of Saint John is in the midst of developing a road safety education program.

City staff say the goal is to make roads safe and accessible for everyone using them.

Jill DeMerchant, a traffic engineer with the city, said they identified six road safety topics.

They include distraction, speeding, cycling, pedestrians, work zones, and rail crossings.

“We felt that these really represented the needs of our community and felt that if we based our campaign on this, it would be very beneficial,” DeMerchant said during a recent presentation to council’s public safety committee.

After identifying the road safety topics, staff came up with the overarching theme of “Share the Road.”

“Road safety is a shared responsibility and all road users must think from other mode users perspectives to ensure safety for all,” said DeMerchant.

DeMerchant said they chose a positive messaging campaign that encourages people to show care for one another rather than a negative campaign that inspires fear through communicating the possible negative impacts of people’s actions.

Staff have worked to develop bilingual educational materials, including animated videos as well as graphics that will be used for both social media and print collateral.

Additional text content is currently being developed for each road safety topic that will be used to accompany the videos and graphics.

DeMerchant said they are working with the city’s communications department to roll out the campaign this spring and summer.