School travel planning an engineer will love: using audits and surveys to identify capital works priorities

School travel plans are a proven successful form of travel demand management in encouraging higher rates of walking and cycling amongst school children. They offer a formal structure within which individual behaviour change interventions, such as walk or ride to school days, can take place. However, within local government, the development of school travel plans has often taken place separately to more traditional traffic management and engineering. While councils have developed good travel plans for schools, they have often done so in response to activity around a school or available funding. In these instances, schools have been guided through the initial steps of the travel plan process, including surveys and traffic audits, but the responsibility for implementation has fallen upon the school, which is often cash strapped and time poor. The City of Moonee Valley opted for a different approach, by first conducting assessments of schools throughout the municipality in order to gauge which were more likely to be successful adopters of travel plans and which had the greatest need, in terms of attempting to rectify unsafe local traffic environments. The assessments also allowed the City to prioritise likely capital works expenditure related to school travel issues. The City of Moonee Valley contracted UrbanTrans to conduct assessments of conditions around 40 schools in the municipality in 2012. Assessments included audits of school traffic conditions and surveys of children and their parents. The results ranked the schools by different criteria, including likely changes to road safety and use of active transport modes by children. The project offers a new way forward for local governments wanting to improve the rates of walking and cycling within schools in their municipalities, in a manner which is integrated with capital works expenditure.