The journey to school is of much concern for two reasons, being traffic safety and health. Children should be able to reach the school safely, if only because government forces them to go to school. Therefore the school route should be ‘guaranteed safe’. Yet children are often subjected to conditions that do not comply with ‘sustainable safety’, a Dutch approach aiming at this guarantee. At the same time children should have sufficient exercise to prevent obesity. Therefore they should be stimulated to go to school on their own. It is a useful exercise in participating in traffic anyhow. The conflict between the two approaches is the subject of the next section. After that general approaches as developing in different countries are discussed, neglecting Dutch ones that are sufficiently know to the NVVC public. An objective normative approach as developed by the first author to assess primary school closures around 1990 is presented in the next section. The central feature of the paper is the detailed description of the Finnish Koululiitu method, aiming at an objective assessment of school routes. It is intended primarily to support decision making on school transport and it is recommended as such by the Finnish counterpart of our Raad van State. The approach, building on road data, but supplemented with accident data and consultancy of local experts, should be considered for application in the Netherlands. In our country school transport decision making is hard to understand, to say the least. (Author/publisher)
Abstract