SafeBike: A road safety program for bicyclists ages 11-14 with a focus on metacognitive skills.

SafeBike is a cycling education program for schools in lower secondary education and was developed to promote road safety among 11- to 14-year-olds.
Every year, almost 30,000 children are involved in road accidents in Germany. The age group with the highest number of accident victims is 11 to 14-year-olds, about half of whom are involved in accidents on bicycles (approx. 5,800 children). The number of bicyclists involved in accidents increases sharply after the transition from elementary to secondary school. This is due to a change in mobility behavior after the change of school compared to the primary school period. Many students start biking to school after transferring to secondary school. At the same time, however, not all skills for safe cycling are developed at this age. Perception errors in particular occur particularly frequently in children and adolescents under 15 years of age compared to other age groups. Furthermore, with the onset of puberty, extensive behavioral changes take place, in which, among other things, the perception of danger decreases and the willingness to take risks increases. However, up to now there have been hardly any traffic education and mobility education measures at secondary schools. This gap is now being closed with SafeBike.
SafeBike is a traffic safety program for secondary school lessons (grades five to nine) that can be conducted class by class in a double lesson. It is based on observation procedures, self-reflection and personal responsibility. In particular, SafeBike raises children's and young people's awareness of the dangers of cycling, which leads to an increased sense of safety. The explicit aim is not to educate the children and young people or to point out existing traffic or behavioral rules, but to give them the opportunity to recognize and take into account their strengths and weaknesses as well as various risk factors in their own riding behavior.

In the program, the target group is presented with various traffic situations from their everyday lives and asked to assess their impressions. The situations and impressions are then discussed together in the classroom. The aim is to significantly reduce the number of 11- to 14-year-olds who have accidents on their bikes in the future.
SafeBike was first piloted in 2020 at two cooperating schools and its effects evaluated. Around 500 children and young people took part in the program. In subsequent surveys, it was found that those who participated in SafeBike committed only half as many driving errors or caused conflicts with other road users as their classmates who did not participate in the program. In particular, significant reductions were achieved in driving errors that were particularly common in prior surveys (including failure to look around, failure to signal by hand, failure to yield the right of way).