Abstract
Children’s independent mobility (CIM), especially regarding their everyday travel to and from school, is an essential component of an equilibrated childhood. It affects positively many aspects of their lives: physical health, social and cognitive skills, and overall sense of wellbeing. In the postwar period the percentage of children travelling independently to school declined dramatically in developed countries, especially due to traffic danger. An urban environment that does not provide for safe routes to school intensifies the use of cars for short rides, creates congestion in school zones, renders streets even more prone to traffic accidents and it is certainly unsustainable, from a climate-change point of view. Due to its multilayered importance, research on CIM, originally a subject of environmental psychology, has lately been expanding in many other fields, such as public health, transport design, urban design, and planning, thus providing valuable qualitative and quantitative data that have steered changes in policies and practices around the world. Ιn Greece, children as pedestrians are killed or injured in road accidents in numbers that continue to be tragically high; at the same time, children are being chauffeured to and back from school by their parents on an everyday basis, in what we could call “ridiculous car trips”. However, CIM has so far been quite an overlooked area of research. The paper presents findings from studies and selected examples of good practices that have promoted children’s independent mobility around the world and compares them with existent situation in Greece.
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Notes
- 1.
The study took place between 2009–2011 in the town of Veria in northern Greece (population 47,000), and involved eighty-one children participants, aged from 9 to 12 years old, living in five different districts of the town, who were asked to photograph the places of their everyday lives and then write their comments about them, creating a photo diary.
- 2.
For the pioneer ‘geographer of children’ William Bunge [4], children are like “canaries in a coalmine”, meaning that they reflect the pressures of the urban environment with greater sensitivity due exactly to their vulnerability. Bunge was the first to introduce the concept of “geographical expedition” for doing research on the everyday spaces of children.
- 3.
For example, data shows that car engines idling at the perimeter of schools is a major source of pollution (idling engines consume 3.5 L of gasoline an hour; 12% of urban smog is attributable to idling vehicles). A “No Idling” campaign in Toronto, Ontario, was organized as a social marketing effort, using posters, stickers, printed material, and involving volunteer parents and school staff.
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Katsavounidou, G. (2021). Children’s Safe and Sustainable Independent Mobility. In: Nathanail, E.G., Adamos, G., Karakikes, I. (eds) Advances in Mobility-as-a-Service Systems. CSUM 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1278. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61075-3_53
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