As part of Dortmund Germany’s City-Wide Emission-Free Programme (Stadtluft ist (emissions-)frei – Dortmunds Einstieg in eine emissionsfreie Innenstadt) Mobycon developed a mobility management project for local elementary schools. The aim of the project was to encourage children to walk or cycle to school instead of being driven. The participating schools were enthusiastic for a change, as the so-called “parent cabs” caused chaos in front of the school every morning. The project had a multi-faceted approach to promote safe and healthy mobility among children and young people.
The first part of the project was a survey to understand the current situation, bottlenecks, and other challenges of the community. Based on these results, as well as traffic safety data and site visits, new safe routes to school maps were created for each of the nine schools. These maps included the safest walking and cycling routes to school. In addition, new pick-up and drop-off zones for cars were proposed and Walking Buses were (re)introduced. The Traffic Tamer programme was introduced to encourage behaviour change through play, where classes were rewarded for their participation. Mobycon created additional measures for further mobility solutions for the future and organized an online workshop with the schools.