Background Road accidents are the great dangers that affect both individuals and society. Thai government regards the problem as high priority and has put its efforts in planning and implementing traffic safety measures to minimise the road traffic injuries. As a result, establishing collaboration in the local private sector can be another choice for effectively preventing the road accidents.

Description of the problem Road Safety Operations Centre of Kranuan sub-district has set up a project named “Prevention of Road Traffic Accidents for Model Sub-District” with the objectives to study the development of an innovation for managing the prevention and the solutions of road traffic accidents through the promotion of collaboration in the local private sector under government support. The methodology included in-depth investigation to obtain the statistical records of road traffic accidents in the studied area. The data were analysed for the causes and the risk factors prior to returning the information to the community for further collaboratively planning its solutions. A civil society for each community was formed to establish its own constitutions and manage to have community check points to prevent the at-risk groups from going out of the areas, to conduct a survey on the hazardous environmental factors and the areas at the high- and the mid-levels of risk in order to lessen the road traffic accidents, and consistently promoting the correct and safe traffic behaviours to road users through the local wire and the community radio broadcastings. The studied area was Nong-No sub-district in Kranuan district. The project had been operated during 2014–2015.

Results Nong-No sub-district is the area under jurisdiction of sub-district municipality consisting of 5 major communities. There were 7 villages with 1,294 households and population of 6,027 in total under its administration. The main road passing through the communities is Kranuan-Nampong route. The vehicles at risk consisted of 224 pickup and large trucks for agricultural products and over 1,490 motorcycles. Majority of the at-risk groups included children and youths who were students of 3 educational institutions in the area. The high-risk environments were the junctions, road curves, slippery road condition, and the roads without traffic line marking. The results from the accident surveillance in the studied area indicated the lower tendency of road traffic accident. In other words, during the fiscal years from 2012–2015, it was reported that there were 133, 97, 83, and 78 accidents with 2, 3, 4, and 0 number of death respectively. There was only once accident occurred on the main road in the year of 2015 while the safety helmet wearing ratio increased from 38% to 42% in the same year.

Conclusions The results suggest that the safety measures being enhanced to the large community from a small but strong community can be another choice to reduce the road traffic accidents. Due to its previous performance, the studied sub-district was rewarded as the winner for the “model sub-district in preventing road traffic accidents in Khonkaen province for the year of 2015”. As a result, in the years from 2015–2016, the Road Safety Operations Centre of Kranuan sub-district committee have enhanced its operation to cover all villages in all sub-districts following the policy for managing “District Health System: DHS”. It is expected to be the major approach to systematically and consistently minimising the road traffic injuries and deaths with sustainable road safety.