Making school zones safer: partnership-based school traffic management.

This webinar explores how the School Traffic Management Program was established, describes challenges of working collaboratively across departments, and relates success stories of this work to date.

Watch the recorded webinar here.

Thursday, 21 June 2018
Presented by Laura Zeglen, School Traffic Management Facilitator at Green Communities Canada
Laura works closely with school communities in Toronto to identify barriers to active and sustainable school travel, particularly with regards to the built environment, and to collectively come up with solutions and plans of action to overcome these barriers. Laura has a background in education and public health. She has trained and worked as a teacher in New Zealand, and holds a Masters degree in Education and Public Health Policy from the University of Toronto. Her public health research includes exploring how the journey to school intersects with considerations of socioeconomic background, geography and gender.

Across the country, traffic and dangerous driver behaviours around schools are increasingly frequent as more and more students are driven to school compared to previous generations. At older schools, the situation is often made worse because those sites were never designed to accommodate car traffic in the first place, as they were designed at a time when a majority of children walked to school.

In the city of Toronto, the Toronto District School Board has partnered with Green Communities Canada to tackle this issue through a pilot project called the School Traffic Management Program, which closely follows the School Travel Planning model. The program’s launch in Fall 2017 aligned with the launch of the City of Toronto’s Vision Zero Road Safety Strategy. Seizing this unique opportunity, stakeholders from both programs have been working closely with one another, bringing together staff from schools, police, public health and traffic operations. Through these collaborations, stakeholders in Toronto are building momentum and making gains toward school zone safety and active school travel unlike any the City has seen in recent history.