Trouble in Paradise project gets Traffic Initiative of the Year award

Located just two hours north of Toronto, North Simcoe is a small peninsula of land, surrounded on three sides by the clear waters of beautiful Georgian Bay. The area is a recreation paradise and for good reason. With boating and all-terrain vehicle (ATV) in summer, and snowmobiling and skiing in winter, there is something for everyone year round.

However, the past decade has seen a rapid increase in growth in snowmobile, ATV and boating traffic. But as the popularity of these sports grow, so have the injuries and deaths associated with them – leading to “Trouble in Paradise – A project to Prevent and Reduce Alcohol Related Injuries and Death among Recreational Transportation Users”.

The Trouble in Paradise –a project to Prevent and Reduce Alcohol Related Injuries and Death among Recreational Transportation Users - earned the Safe and Sober Awareness Committee and their community partners the Traffic Initiative of the Year Award!

The Trouble in Paradise project has received much attention at provincial, national and international conferences, in part due to the innovative nature of the public education ads. Recently, the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police awarded this project the Traffic Initiative of the Year at its annual conference in Niagara Falls. Sponsored by the Ministry of Transportation, the award recognizes the creation, development and implementation of Ontario’s most successful traffic safety programs.

To ensure success of the project it was necessary to partner with law enforcement, health care organizations, recreation associations and businesses on the local level notes Susan Lalonde Rankin, Program Consultant in Provincial Services at CAMH, who took a lead role in writing the grant proposal, as well as presenting on the initiative to various groups including the Ontario Injury Prevention (Thunder Bay) and the National Injury Prevention conferences in Toronto last fall.

“Although most Ontarians understand that drinking and driving a car is dangerous that message has not gotten through clearly when it comes to drinking and recreational transportation use,” says Susan. “These factors – the rise in popularity of the sports and the attitude that driving recreation vehicles after drinking is low risk – led our Safe and Sober Awareness committee to apply for a Health Canada grant to fund the Trouble in Paradise project,” she adds.

The 18-month project had two parts. First was to assess beliefs and behaviours related to alcohol use and driving among boaters, ATV and snowmobile drivers. Second, was to implement a comprehensive plan built on the audience assessment that would include: public education, policy development and enforcement.

During the audience assessment phase of the project, participants in focus groups expressed their wariness of seeing messages showing the negative health impacts of drinking and driving. To get their buy-in, they said something new that emphasized the financial consequences of drinking and driving. In the words of one participant, we needed to “hit them in the pocket book.”

Armed with that knowledge, the creative minds at Marking Plus, in collaboration with the Safe and Sober Committee members, came up with novel, attention-grabbing ads. With support from community businesses the committee ensured that the ads were everywhere – billboards, newspaper, radio, the Web as well as posters at gas stations, grocery stores and licensing offices. In a follow up survey, over 60% of respondents had seen the ads.

Additional Success

In North Simcoe there are 79 establishments licensed to serve alcohol, some of them directly on the trails or waterways. With support from Larry Grand, CAMH Program Consultant, the Trouble in Paradise project hosted a workshop during which local restaurants and bars developed customer and staff policies designed to promote safe and legal service that will have long lasting effects on serving practices.

The evaluation for the project, done in consultation with Cindy Smythe from the CAMH Social Prevention and Policy Research, indicates that there is cause for optimism that trends in driving recreation vehicles after drinking are changing for the better in North Simcoe. And even though the funding for the project has ended, the work continues. The Safe and Sober Awareness committee has put all the project materials on one DVD for use by other injury prevention coalitions in Ontario.

As an added bonus, Susan also notes that the project was also nominated for a Ministry of Transportation Road Safety Award in 2007.