This PhD research began with desk research, providing a global overview of road safety with a focus on adolescents' vulnerability due to their developmental stage, inexperience, and high risk exposure. This review emphasized traffic safety education (TSE) as a key preventive measure and highlighted emerging technologies like gamification, VR, and eye-tracking for enhancement. Building on this foundation, a qualitative cross-sectional study used focus groups and interviews to gather stakeholder insights on TSE implementation in Vietnam, but also in other developing countries namely, India and Nepal, identifying gaps and needs for innovative, context-specific TSE.

To explore risky behaviors among Vietnamese adolescents, video-elicitation focus groups captured real-time footage of their rides, prompting discussions on motives such as peer pressure, time urgency, and perceived invulnerability, reducing biases from self-reports. Next, a quantitative cross-sectional study combined questionnaires and portable eye-tracking to assess traffic sign knowledge and visual behaviors during cycling, revealing a gap in observation and knowledge of traffic signs among adolescents. A gamified e-learning platform with city-specific modules was used to evaluate improvements in adolescents' traffic knowledge, situational awareness, risk detection, and management, as measured via platform scores and pre/post surveys on attitudes, engagement, and motivation. Finally, a VR training was developed and evaluated via a pre-post randomized controlled trial to assess VR cycling training's effectiveness, dividing participants into experimental (VR training), active control (paper tests), and passive control (no training) groups for comparative analysis.

Results tackle rising adolescent fatalities in Vietnam's mixed traffic, reframing risks as systemic for prevention via policy/technology/collaboration, hence saving lives globally.