Roads4all: Driving a cultural shift in road safety

Turning road safety into a shared conversation through stand-up comedy

Every year, thousands of people are killed or seriously injured on Europe’s roads. While infrastructure and technology continue to improve, risky behaviours such as speeding, distraction, and low awareness persist. Roads4All starts from a simple premise: safer mobility is not only a technical challenge, but a cultural one.

The project brings together behavioural science, community engagement, and policy innovation to help transform how people think, act, and relate to each other in traffic, shifting the focus from individual responsibility to a shared culture of care.

From local insights to collective change

Within Roads4All, DISSCO contributes through a creative and participatory approach that combines field engagement with communication.

Across five Living Roads in Europe, we co-design and implement locally tailored walkshops together with Living Road Boards. These participatory formats bring together local stakeholders to explore everyday mobility experiences, generate place-based insights, and open dialogue around road safety culture in context.

Humour as a tool for reflection

In parallel, we run a hybrid Stand-Up comedy academy on mobility, inviting participants from diverse backgrounds to explore traffic culture through humour. The aim is not to create comedians, but to equip people with new ways to reflect, communicate, and engage others around road safety.

Beyond comedy training, the academy unfolds through a series of interconnected activities, including walkshops, film screenings, discussions with experts, playful and participatory workshops, as well as improvisation sessions. Together, these formats create a rich learning environment where participants can explore local challenges from multiple perspectives.

Through this process, participants co-create short performances inspired by their experiences within the Living Roads.

The academy culminates in a series of comedy video sets, where these original acts by participants are shared with local audiences, creating space for collective reflection, dialogue, and new perspectives on mobility.

Featured photo: Bus drivers in Thessaloniki, personal archive (family Tsianou)