Someone’s Son

In May 2010 the safer roads partnerships for South and West Yorkshire and Humberside launched a joint motorcycle casualty reduction campaign, ‘Someone’s Son’.

Developed independently of the Think! Named Rider campaign, the Someone’s Son campaign follows a similar theme and could be seen as the local equivalent to the national campaign.

The campaign seeks to ‘humanise’ motorcyclists in an attempt to make drivers take extra care to look out for them. The rider at the next junction is almost certainly ‘Someone’s Son’ or brother/husband/mother….

The campaign is very data led and used MAST, Mosaic and causation data to help deliver key messages to the right target audience at the right time.

It focuses on collisions between motorcycle and other vehicles, mainly car drivers and urges drivers to “check once, check twice, check for bikes”. In addition we urge riders to make themselves visible to drivers through the wearing of high vis clothing.

The Someone’s Son team have recently completed its first evaluation report using the new RoSPA E-valu-it toolkit and invite people to view it.

A second wave of the campaign is currently underway and will continue into the 2012. One of the key successes of this campaign is the pooling of resources and expertise across the Yorkshire and Humber region. This has enabled the campaign to continue during times of budget cuts whilst tackling a regional casualty problem.