The Conscious Crossing
KiwiRail & TrackSAFE NZ
Issue 43 | June 2017
Agency
Clemenger BBDO New Zealand
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director Brigid Alkema Creative Director Emily Beautrais Creatives Steve Hansen, JP Twaalfhoven
Production Team
Executive Producer Christina Hazard Producers Carly Neemia, Carne Godfrey Production Company Flare
Other Credits
Account Director Claudia Zwimpfer Account Manager Fern Holloway TrackSAFE Foundation Manager Megan Drayton Rail Safety Week Co-ordinator Kirsten Kilmister Head of Marketing, KiwiRail Ah-Leen Rayner
Date
August 2016
Background
Last year, 28 New Zealanders were hit or experienced near misses at railway level crossings.
Warning signals could not be installed at many of these crossings, so pedestrians needed to be attentive and check for trains themselves. But research showed that the more familiar people were with an environment, the less attention they gave it, making them less alert to danger.
For Rail Safety Week, the challenge was to battle this complacency and find a way to make pedestrians alert to the risks.
Idea
Research showed human brains needed something to have changed within a familiar environment for them to actively engage with it. So, The Conscious Crossing was designed and installed, a way of keeping the environment around a level-crossing changing so people would be more aware of it.
It comprised a cost-effective set of gates, which could be reconfigured an infinite number of times, forcing pedestrians into the moment every time they crossed. Anyone could change the layout of the gates at any time.
Results
After the success of the first trial, the Conscious Crossing was pushed through more extensive testing, with the hope of implementing the system throughout NZ.
Our Thoughts
If you want to change behaviours, you really do need to be able to engage people at the right time, in the right place and with the right message. But how to do that when people are in a bubble of their own, walking home or cycling to a friend's house?
No matter how brilliant the TV commercial might have been when you saw it on the box the night before, it isn't front-of-mind in the moment you approach the level crossing. And that's what I love about this. Someone thought very hard about the problem and came up with a real and lasting solution to it. In many other agencies, the team would have thought quite hard about it and would have come up with an ad of some sort, which would have had no effect at all.