Rainbow Routes

Our children’s journey to school should be enjoyable, safe, and healthy. The sad truth is that for many children in the UK it isn’t [1]. Almost 40% of UK primary school runs are by car, reducing daily childhood exercise and negatively affecting long-term health. For those who do travel actively, the pollution, fast-moving traffic, inadequate crossings, and pavement obstruction mean that the school run is often unsafe [2] and far from healthy [1, 3].

Our overarching goal is to develop safe and attractive rainbow routes to school to make active travel enjoyable and to make it the easy, sensible option for the school run.

To understand how to best implement these rainbow routes, we plan to build on existing air-quality monitoring in the local schools [4] and embed the rainbow routes within a new research project to collect smartphone app-based data on active travel. We need this research because there is a large gap in the data around active [5,6,7] and multimodal travel [8,9], for example driving, then walking to school, or walking to school then taking the bus to work. Data collection has also traditionally focused on commuter travelling on radial routes into and out of the city centre, neglecting the millions of journeys to and from school, which are themselves often an integral part of the commute to work. 

This data gap is responsible for the slow implementation of policy and interventions that favour active travel [10]. The gap exists because traditional survey methods significantly under-report active travel journeys [6,10,11]. Here we propose to use an innovative smartphone app (TravelVu) that tracks multimodal and active travel accurately and in real-time. This would be its first use in England. At the same time we will continue to monitor air quality in and around the school and using wearable pollution monitors (on loan from the Urban Flows Observatory) during the school-run to develop a holistic view of travel behaviour and its impact.

In addition to capturing the behaviour of parents, we are keen to capture children's perspectives. Their voices are almost completely absent from the decision-making process surrounding active travel, despite the fact that we need the next generation to make healthier and more sustainable lifestyle choices. The best way to achieve this behavioural change is by encouraging healthy, sustainable habits from an early age. We will collect the children's perspectives by analysing data from the on-going WOW travel tracker at the school and from qualitative data collected from interviews and school-based activities with children from Hunter’s Bar Infant and Junior Schools.

The data we gather will be important because traffic planners and policy makers rely on it. When the data is skewed towards motorized transport, as now, the planning and infrastructure are likewise skewed in this direction, at the expense of other road users and at the expense of our children’s safety, lifelong health and future environment.

References

[1] Living Streets School Run Report by Smith, H. Accessed 16/10/2021.

[2] On average 1 child a week under the age of 16 is killed on the road and 37 are seriously injured. Facts on Child Casualties (June 2015), Department for Transport. Accessed 16/10/2021.

[3] Control pollution, protect children, save lives, by Bush, P. British Medical Journal DOI: BMJ 2021;373:n1110 (2021) and references therein.

[4] BREATHE: A feasibility study of green barriers to air pollution mitigation in school playgrounds, Maria del Carmen Redondo Bermudez. Accessed 16/10/2021.

[5] Feng et al., Data collection methods for studying pedestrian behaviour: A systematic review, Building and Environment 187, 107329 (2021).

[6] Schoner et al., Prioritizing Pedestrian and Bicyclist Count Locations for Volume Estimation, Transport Research Record DOI:10.1177/03611981211011164 (2021).

[7] Alattar et al., Sources and Applications of Emerging Active Travel Data: A Review of the Literature, Sustainability, 13, 7006 (2021).

[8] Tenkanen and Toivonen, Longitudinal spatial dataset on travel times and distances by diferent travel modes in Helsinki Region, Scientific Data 7, 77 (2020).

[9] Lyons et al., Combo Travel Active and motorised modes working better together, Innovate UK Report (2021) Accessed 20/10/2021

[10] “..fostering [active travel] requires well-informed policies and interventions, which have often been stalled by inadequate data available from traditional data sources.” Alattar et al., pp. 1-2, Sources and Applications of Emerging Active Travel Data: A Review of the Literature, Sustainability, 13, 7006 (2021).

[11] Diogenes et al., Pedestrian Counting Methods at Intersections. A Comparative Study. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2002, pp. 26–30 (2007).

There are two phases to our project:

Phase 1.

We plan to gather baseline data about the travel behaviour of parents of children at Hunters Bar Infant and Junior Schools in Sheffield using a novel app-based survey technology, TravelVu. At the same time, we will monitor air quality data at the school (on-going research project) and on the journey to school using portable sensors (on loan from the Urban Flows Observatory). The initial travel survey will run for 14 days (during a 2-month window), with air quality monitoring throughout the project.

We will incentivise parents to download the app and to correct their data by offering vouchers for businesses that are local to the school. In this way, we can start to positively engage local businesses with the active travel and safe streets agenda and support the post-Covid local business recovery. 

The data from the app and the air quality monitors will be analysed by a collaborative team including researchers and consultants at ARUP, Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) and The University of Sheffield (TUOS). 

Phase 2.

In phase 2 we will implement active travel interventions: our rainbow routes to school. The choice of interventions will be based on data from phase 1, together with the extensive expertise from practitioners at ARUP and researchers from SHU, as well as conversations with ModeShift Star Co-ordinators, Sheffield City Councillors, local Living Streets group members and Sheffield City Region representatives. 

We envisage that interventions will include an educational publicity campaign and more dynamic use of our street space, for example by the closure of streets to motorized traffic around the school during school drop off and pick up times. Importantly, we also plan to develop five rainbow routes following the desire lines of active travellers across the school catchment and to highlight to drivers the routes that local children take to school. The aesthetic of these routes will be designed as a collaboration between school children, local artists, and travel planners. They will become a focal point for future interventions and for publicity.

We will continue to monitor the app-based travel data and air quality following each intervention to understand their impact.

This project will have several important impacts at different levels. For example, the data and findings from the project will be published to help guide policy at the local, national, and European level. 

At the local level, the data will help us to develop rainbow routes for safer streets for the children of Hunter’s Bar Infant and Junior Schools in Sheffield. The schools are diverse and multicultural with families from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds. Safer and less-polluted streets will have a disproportionately positive impact on the less-affluent households, which are more likely to suffer from the negative aspects of a behaviour (car ownership and driving) that they are not able to participate in.

However, we believe that the rainbow routes project will benefit the entire community. Transitioning from a car-based school run to an active school run could make a significant difference to the number of cars on the road, helping the UK achieve the government’s target to ‘slash emissions by 78% by 2035’ [1]. This is because the size of the school run is huge: nationally, at morning peak at least one in four cars (25%) on the road are on the school run [2] (estimates for this number vary: the WHO suggests as many as 40% of cars during morning peak could be on the school run in the UK [3]). These cars are responsible for generating half a million tonnes of CO2 per year [2], despite the typically short distances travelled, with significant consequences for the climate. In terms of pollution, road transport is responsible for some 80% of NOx concentrations at the roadside and it is estimated that 17,000 premature deaths are caused by pollution [4]. A drop in car traffic of 25-40% because of an active school run should improve air quality, mitigate climate change and reduce peak congestion. Intervention designed to increase active travel on the school run is good for children, parents, local residents and even car drivers coming into the city on necessary journeys.

In addition to the arguments surrounding air quality and climate change, the benefits from active travel extend to the physical and mental health of the children and their parents. Currently only 1 in 5 boys (21%) and 1 in 6 girls (16%) aged 5-15 in England are meeting recommended levels of physical activity [5]. This has contributed to a childhood obesity crisis where almost 30% of children in England are overweight or obese [6]. The mental health benefits of regular active travel, such as walking to school, are widely accepted [2]. An active school run will improve children's health and wellbeing now, as well as fostering healthy and sustainable life-long habits for the future.

We need safer streets and more reliable data on active travel if we want to reduce the school run’s reliance on the car. This project will help fuel a revolution to enable safe, healthy, enjoyable, sustainable and convenient active travel and safe streets for all.

References

[1] Government Press Release UK enshrines new target in law to slash emissions by 78% by 2035. Accessed 16/10/2021.

[2] Living Streets School Run Report by Smith, H. Accessed 16/10/2021.

[3] Mundu et al., Health Effects and Risks of Transport Systems: the HEARTS project, World Health Organization. Copenhagen, WHO Regional Office for Europe. (2006)

[4] Breathing Life into the UK Economy, Quantifying the economic benefits of cleaner air (2020). CBI report. Accessed 16/10/2021

[5] British Heart Foundation. Physical Activity Statistics (2015). Accessed 16/10/2021

[6] Children’s well-being and social relationships, UK, (2018) Office for National Statistics. Accessed 16/10/2021