Make Roads Safe global ambassador Michelle Yeoh has supported the launch of a new motorcycle helmet campaign in Thailand.
Michelle Yeoh joined the Asia Injury Prevention Foundation to launch the ‘Head Safe = Helmet On’ campaign targeting Thai motorcycle riders and passengers. The campaign will include television commercials, outdoor ads, online and print communications, a comic character spokesperson for children, endorsements by celebrities and accident victims, child helmet education events and helmet donations. The campaign will run in six provinces of the country.
Greig Craft, AIP Foundation President, said: “AIP Foundation has developed a successful model that dramatically increased helmet use in Vietnam. Now, we are exporting that recipe for reducing traffic fatalities to Thailand, where the road safety issue is just as critical.”
Michelle Yeoh was joined at the press conference in Bangkok by Ajan Wipaphan Herrmann, a mother who lost her young daughter in a motorbike accident. Twenty-two year old Khun Manoha was a passenger on a Bangkok motorcycle taxi which was hit by a bus. A helmet might have saved her life.
“This needless loss of our young people on the roads must stop – and we already know how to make this happen,” Michelle Yeoh said. “The best way to serve the memories of those whom traffic accidents have already taken from us is to use their tragic stories to teach the next generation of children proper helmet use, for safer road travel.”
The campaign launch also promoted the Make Roads Safe campaign’s ‘Decade of Action for Road Safety’. Michelle Yeoh commented: “This November governments from across the world will meet in Russia for the first time to agree joint action on road safety. But the real change can only come at national, local and street level, and from the work of organisations like AIP Foundation”.
AIP Foundation’s new campaign is being organised in partnership with Thailand’s Office of Transport and Traffic Policy and Planning (OTP), the King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), and the FIA Foundation. Chamroon Tangpaisalkit, Transport Technical Advisor of OTP, commented. “It is a lack of understanding of safe road behaviour, as much as the traffic collisions themselves, that is killing young drivers and passengers. Change that behaviour by putting helmets on heads, and all of a sudden the road becomes a much safer place.”