With an unusual project, the city of Kriens wants to find out where the dangerous places are on the way to school. Other communities could benefit from the experiences made.
In Switzerland, around 400 children have an accident every year on the way to school.
Monday is the first day of school for tens of thousands of girls and boys. Many parents look forward to this day with mixed feelings, as every year more than 400 children have an accident on the way to school in Switzerland. Children perceive their surroundings differently than adults and are not yet able to correctly assess hazards such as the speed and distance of approaching vehicles.
In many communities, children have to cross busy streets and negotiate various other dangerous traffic situations on their way to kindergarten, school or the gym. The most effective measure to make the way to school safer is to specifically identify and defuse the critical points.
The way to school is recorded and analyzed
However, in most towns and villages there is a lack of information about where the tricky spots actually are. The city of Basel therefore carried out an online survey on this topic in the spring of this year. Children, parents and teachers were asked to mark and describe danger spots in the vicinity of around 200 school and childcare locations.
The city of Kriens in the canton of Lucerne is going one step further in the school year that is now beginning. She lets the children record their way to school and the associated challenges themselves. Around 160 first graders are equipped with a GPS tracker that digitally records their way to school. The experiment will start after the autumn holidays. In this way, confusing pedestrian crossings, places where there are dangerous crossings with bicycles and other dangerous places should be recognized.
«With this method, we receive precise information about where the school children’s paths lead. We then compare this data with our information on the traffic routes and quickly see where the greatest sources of danger lie,” explains the responsible city councilor Maurus Frey. Traffic planners have already worked out around 600 measures in the Lucerne suburb, and the children are now deciding which of them to prioritize. The parliament of the Lucerne suburb, which has around 28,000 inhabitants, has approved a special loan of CHF 220,000 for the next ten years for the project.
However, this does not mean that the first graders in Kriens become “spy children” who are monitored around the clock and who send data. “We’re actually only digitizing what we’ve known up to now as school route narratives,” says Frey. At the end of each school week, the children and their parents can follow their “traces” on a website and enter places that particularly caught their eye.
For example, a spot where there is always a car near a pedestrian crossing or where the children often meet a disgruntled dog. Parents use this website to give their consent for the data to be passed on. In addition, data collection is limited to the times when the children are on their way to school or home. “Data protection is thus guaranteed,” says Frey. The data collected by the GPS tracker is anonymized.
The use of the tracking devices is also part of a whole package of measures that the city of Kriens has developed together with the Labor Luzern, a platform for education and community in the field of contemporary media. The topic of safety on the way to school is part of the regular lessons for the youngest and is taken up, for example, using a coloring sheet developed by teachers. In addition, a traffic policeman visits the various school classes and gives the children tips on how to behave properly in traffic.
“We don’t just give the kids a spy gadget and hide it in a stuffed animal, for example. We talk intensively with the students about the project and what role they play in it,” says building manager Frey. “You underestimate the students if you think they can’t handle such technical devices.” He is convinced that the first results will soon be available. However, the project is designed for the long term, since the school route network is changing dynamically. Over the next few years, more school classes will be equipped with GPS trackers so that new danger spots can be quickly discovered and eliminated.
Although the project has attracted a great deal of attention in the media, no other municipality has so far contacted the city of Kriens. Since this is an open source project and the firmware code is public, other communities can launch similar projects based on the experiences made in Kriens. “We want to show that data-driven government is not something abstract, but that something can be achieved in everyday life on the basis of collected data,” says Maurus Frey.
Tips for Parents
Despite such projects, it will never be possible to eradicate all the dangers on the way to school. Nevertheless, experts advise against driving the students to class in the so-called parent taxi. But parents can take various measures to ensure that their children are less exposed to danger.
The experts recommend that parents should not practice the shortest, but rather the safest route to school with their children. It can be more dangerous to walk down a quiet street without a sidewalk than to walk on the sidewalk on a busy street. It is also recommended that children wear light-colored clothes so that drivers can recognize them early and easily. Reflectors on the jacket and on the school desk provide particularly good visibility.
Children should also be sent on their way early on, so that they don’t pay too little attention to the traffic in the hectic pace and endanger themselves as a result. It is also advisable for children to travel to school with their colleagues. This way, walking to school is even more fun.