School Street Consultancy

Description

A school street is an active travel initiative to create safer and healthier car free environments outside schools across the county . The aim of a school street is to reduce school drop-off and pick-up traffic volumes by minimising the volume of motorised vehicles entering the road or roads outside a school during their busy morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up times. A school street is developed by working in collaboration with schools, implementing additional active travel measures to support the increase in travelling to school by walking, wheeling, cycling, and scooting, whilst reducing car-use, and car-dependence. A school street is implemented by OCC using an experimental traffic regulation order (ETRO) followed by a traffic regulation order (TRO). Since 2022, OCC has been working with several schools across Oxfordshire to trial and implement school streets, and school streets have been introduced at 9 schools so far. The School Streets Team is now looking at implementing a longer-term programme offer of implementing school streets and active travel measures across Oxfordshire Schools. Introduction OCC are seeking the services of a consultancy to conduct an in-depth analysis of schools within Oxfordshire to determine which schools are most suitable for the implementation of a school street. The consultancy will identify schools where the implementation of a school street would have the most significant positive impact, based on a variety of factors including geographical positioning, environmental considerations, the potential for modal shift, and road safety concerns. OCC is motivated to deliver a long-term school street programme, which is an effective approach in increasing active travel and improving road safety for schools which leads to happier and healthier children, and supports reducing car use across Oxfordshire. School engagement is vital for a successful school street implementation, however, there are many variables which need to be considered first to identify the school's suitability for a school street. Collating and weighting the data for each school across Oxfordshire will create an unbiased matrix which will inform all future school streets application and delivery.