Find out if your children’s school is dangerous or not!
According to INEGI data, in Mexico City, more than 40% of boys and girls go to school on foot and 74% of pedestrian and cyclist collisions at school entry and exit times, occur 200 meters away. of schools. Therefore, road accidents are the first cause of death in Mexico for boys and girls.
Seeking to reduce the death of girls and boys from road accidents, the Pedestrian League organization presented Caminito de la Escuela, a citizen participation methodology that consists of tools and data that allow citizens to demand better and safer school environments from the authorities. Because if the authorities intervened in the most dangerous environments, hundreds of deaths of children per year could be avoided.
How do I know that my child’s school is dangerous or not?
In addition, they presented the web platform www.caminitodelaescuela.org where it is possible to consult a geo-referenced map that allows recognizing how dangerous a school environment is. Thanks to this, it was possible to determine that the delegation with the most collisions was Cuauhtémoc (22 schools located in quadrants with the highest accidents), while 74% of all collisions occurred in a range of 9 to 200 meters from the schools. In addition, 5% of the intersections (188) concentrate 20% of the hit, dead and injured.
This led to the generation of a methodology for transforming school environments based on making citizens participate and powerful agents of change. This methodology consists of 1) knowing how dangerous an environment is, 2) evaluating why it is dangerous, 3) empowerment through temporary interventions in space and neighborhood organization and; 4) require the authorities to intervene and transform the environments permanently to reduce accidents and avoid deaths from being run over.
It is important to understand that it is the obligation and responsibility of governments to promote and provide the safe infrastructure that prevents accidents on our streets. That is why this tool is powerful because it seeks an integral transformation and allows us to understand that citizens can change the street not only by organizing ourselves but by demanding these changes from those who are obliged to provide them ?, said Dana Corres, General Coordinator of the League Pedestrian.
Thanks to this study, it is estimated that intervening in the top 3 of dangerous environments by delegation (46 school environments) would impact more than 17 thousand children, avoiding up to 163 collisions per year, while, intervening in the most dangerous environment by delegation ( 16 school environments) it would impact more than 7 thousand children avoiding up to 57 collisions per year
In addition, as a Citizen Participation Cookbook (showing the 4 steps of the methodology), Pedestrian Link gives citizens recipes for street interventions such as painting zebras, potting benches near schools, the walker, use of shared cars, neighborhood announcements made by children, among others, and media campaigns to demand improvements in urban infrastructure.