The safety of students travelling to and from school is one of the most important issues for school communities. Road environments around schools are complex and children are not always equipped to deal with the challenges. Improving road safety can seem challenging. However, road controlling authorities (RCAs), New Zealand Police and other key road safety partners are committed to working with schools to improve safety. But school road safety is everyone’s responsibility and so we also need commitment from parents, teachers, boards of trustees, along with road safety professionals to address the issues. These guidelines are designed to help parents, school staff, boards of trustees and students to improve road safety in their local community. It contains a clear process that school communities can follow, guidance on how to communicate with relevant road controlling authorities and a range of good practice solutions to address school road safety issues. As part of the process of understanding and communicating school road safety concerns, a School Road Safety Survey is included to help with the problem solving process. This should be used alongside more objective data gathered by RCAs to identify road safety issues. These guidelines are not intended to provide comprehensive technical information. Instead it is a user— friendly companion to the more technical guide Safer journeys for rural schools (http://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/safer-journeys-for-schools) which is designed for use by road safety professionals within RCAs. Some members of school communities may have an interest in this more technical guide if they are working with road safety professionals to develop specific solutions for their local school. Each school faces unique road safety issues based on location and the surrounding environment. This guide has been designed to help schools develop a way forward to address their concerns in the most appropriate way. The appropriate road safety solution for each school is likely to be different and may require a number of approaches and possible solutions to improve road safety. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting