We must redesign our public safety signs to save lives

Otherwise, the consequences would surely be fatal. One such fatal accident took place last week on the Bharathapuzha bridge near Shoranur Junction railway station in Kerala. Four contract labourers hired for cleaning railway tracks were hit by an oncoming train on this bridge.

With railway lines criss-crossing the length and breadth of India, track trespasser deaths are a daily occurrence in India. According to reports, in 2023, there were as many as 1,357 deaths on railway tracks in Kerala alone. 

There has been a 32% increase in such deaths over the 2022 toll. One might be tempted to turn a blind eye towards this problem as these fatalities take place because of an illegal activity: trespassing on railway property. 

But the truth is that as the population density around railway tracks increases, people spilling onto these lines becomes an inevitability. So, trespasser deaths will continue to rise in India. What can be done at least to mitigate this mortality?

I have had the fortune of interacting with many officials of the Indian Railways who were very keen to mitigate the problem of trespassing accidents on railway tracks. This gave me an opportunity to study the problem of trespassing in depth.

A railway track is unambiguously an unsafe place. A track on a bridge across a river is an even more dangerous path to walk on. Nobody needs training sessions to be made aware of this obvious fact. But the problem with the human brain is that awareness does not always automatically translate to appropriate action. 

The generation of the right behaviour is contingent on appropriate stimuli being deployed at the right time to trigger that behaviour. And the best place to influence any particular human behaviour is at the exact spot where that behaviour takes place.

Safety signage is the best media option available at a trespassing location to provide an appropriate stimulus. Right now, the only signage that a person sees before entering a railway river bridge is a retro-reflective board with the name of the river written in English and the local language. 

Today’s road signs are very similar to those that were first installed in Detroit way back in 1915. These outdated safety signs are far from effective in triggering safe behaviour among people entering unsafe environments.

There is another human behaviour complexity one should keep in mind while trying to promote safety behaviours. In any person who regularly indulges in risky behaviour, the regularity of that behaviour reduces the feeling of risk attached to that dangerous activity. 

This reduction in risk perceptions is also what makes experienced workers more prone to unsafe behaviour at work. So, a contract worker who works regularly on railway tracks is more susceptible to a trespassing accident than a person crossing the same railway track for the first time.

What is the best antidote to the human tendency to indulge in various unsafe behaviours? The emotion of fear. This emotion has probably saved far more human lives than all of modern medicine put together. But how can we effectively use this emotion? Will depicting death, as shown in cigarette packaging, work? 

No, it will not. Because the human brain is created to deny death. None of us has experienced our own death even in our dreams. So, every time we see an image of death, it is taken as something that happens to other people. Depictions of death do not make humans more receptive to warnings.

But when we see the fearful expression of another human, or even an animal, we immediately know there is some sort of danger lurking around. 

This transmission of fear from one person to another is done through a set of neurons in our brain called mirror neurons. It is mirror neurons that process other’s fear signals and in turn transmit their fears to us. 

But how do we convert this human-to-human fear transmission into a scalable proposition? The answer lies in the use of photographs. They are not as effective as the sight of an actual human’s fearful face, but are second best.

Today, most signage used for public communication is graphic in nature. If photographic images could replace these graphic images in all safety signage, the emotion of fear could be effectively communicated at scale. 

The safety signage can be made even more effective if the image deployed helps a person anticipate the consequences of a risky decision before it is made.

Today, only one sign is usually installed at a spot. But a study of effective communication strategies used by political parties and organized religions shows that repetition is an integral part of their communication. So, if the signage is repeated, especially in life and death situations, it would go a long way in improving its effectiveness.

Hundreds of deaths take place every day on Indian roads, railway tracks and construction sites. Although it is known that much human behaviour can be changed and many human lives saved with effective safety signage, very little thought has been given so far to redoing these signs. How many more lives must be lost before we deploy modern-day intelligence to redesign our century-old public safety signage?