School kids in Kerpen, Germany take on road safety.
Each year some 1.35 million people die on the world’s roads, and another 20 to 50 million are seriously injured, according to the World Health Organization. Kids are among the hardest hit: traffic crashes are now the leading killer of children and young people aged 5-29 years worldwide.
Many children are regularly killed on their way to school in some countries.
Efforts to combat the global public health crisis include many relatively low-tech and inexpensive initiatives, like donating backpacks with reflector strips to school kids, installing road improvements like speed bumps, bollards (posts), and zebra crossings near crosswalks close to schools.
“Simple measures can achieve very, very big results” Volker Noeske, head of the technology center for DEKRA, a company based in Germany that conducts automotive testing, inspection and crash research, said at the International Transport Forum’s 2019 summit in Leipzig, Germany earlier this year during a panel session on safety for vulnerable road users. “It’s not rocket science. We need to educate children.”
DEKRA, for example, which recently released its new “Road Safety Report 2019: Children on the Road,” routinely provides a range of outreach initiatives to school children to improve safety, from distributing small red caps with reflective material to increase visibility to establishing programs to learn about traffic dangers from the local police. “They put potatoes under a wheel of a bus to show what happens to feet,” in a collision, Noeske told Forbes in a phone interview. “It’s a combination of all these measures - education, training, and infrastructure improvements.”
Saul Billingsley, another panelist, stressed the need for a safe systems approach — designing the infrastructure based on the idea that people are human and will make mistakes. “We need to think differently; we need to educate engineers,” said Billingsley, executive director of the London-based FIA Foundation. “Children are dying. We need to design out speed,” he said. “The key is design, design, design.”
Elementary School Kids Design Children’s Roundabout
Near a school in Kerpen, Germany, children designed brightly-colored, child-friendly signage, zebra ... [+]
About 15 years ago, Kerpen, a town in western Germany, took on the design challenge when it realized it experienced more crashes involving children than other similar sized towns.
“We scanned the environment, we scanned the infrastructure, we reached out to the public through news outlets,” Guido Ensemeier, department manager for traffic and urban development for Kerpen and one of the panelists, told Forbes. “We asked in the public schools, we asked parents, and we asked school children where they found it dangerous.”
The town sponsored a bus tour with elementary school children, who were asked to point out problem areas.
“We found out that there was one place where it was very difficult to cross the street, where most traffic moved too fast,” Ensemeier said. “We didn’t know the right thing to do, how to solve the problem. We engaged safety experts, but then we thought, ‘let’s work with the children.’”
So it was the local elementary kids who ultimately came up with the solutions. In a series of half-day work sessions, “we showed the children lots of possibilities, but in the end, they decided” how to render them, based on their ideas.
The results were brightly-colored, child-friendly signage, zebra crossings and a roundabout, designed and mostly painted by the kids, completed in 2012.
Kerpen has not had a single road death since then, Ensemeier said.
In fact, in 2016 it won DEKRA’s the vision zero award because from 2009 to 2016 there were no fatal accidents on urban streets. Kerpen was one of only a handful of cities in Europe with such a good result, Ensemeier said. “The children’s roundabout is only one of a lot of our activities to improve safety for pedestrian and bicycle traffic in our city.”
There weren’t reported deaths of schoolchildren before the roundabout was installed, but slower traffic has spawned benefits beyond preventing fatalities, Ensemeier said, noting that previously parents worried about their children’s safety, so frequently drove them to school. “Now, more kids walk and bike to school. It’s good for their health, there are less parking lots, and there is less pollution.” It’s good for socialization, too, he said. “They talk to other kids before school.”
And it works, Ensemeier stressed, because it’s not just any roundabout, “it’s their roundabout.”
