Search Results (14)

Residential education often both challenges and reinforces the norms and systems supporting children and young people’s need for homely environments. In this context, studies on pupils’ sense of home when attending residential schools provide a ground for exploring broader infrastructures of care available to them as they move through different spaces. Drawing on autoethnography, life-story interviews, and semi-structured interviews, we illustrate how, for children within the Latvian residential school system, homeliness may be found at a relative’s apartment, school bus or youth center affected by how each of the spaces relates to children’s safety and control, privacy, community, identity, everyday life, and time. While normative discourses remain fixated on home as a family space where infrastructures of care can be limited, but educational settings emphasize control as a measure for safety without being attentive to peer-to-peer relationships, children’s agency in achieving a sense of homeliness becomes fragmented and stronger in some places more than others. Full article

In Korea, drivers should come to a complete halt and proceed cautiously when encountering a school bus displaying its red warning lights and other safety features, a requirement that is often disregarded in practice. The reason for this might stem from a lack of awareness about the law, and we set out to investigate whether an innovative lighting system employing road projections or VMS could encourage compliance. We found that while 63% of drivers in surveys indicated they would correctly stop when approaching a stopped school bus, in driving experiments, we found that only 18% of drivers did. Our study also uncovered a knowledge gap, with just 53% to 60% of respondents correctly answering basic about the purpose of existing lighting and laws related to school buses. With on-road experiments, when we introduced road projection systems for enhanced non-connected vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, we found that understanding would increase and compliance could increase by up to 77% (from surveys) and 93% (in road tests); these findings underscore the potential of road projections or potentially VMS as effective V2V tools for enhancing road safety in proximity to school buses. Full article

Using surrogate safety measures is a common method to assess safety on roadways. Surrogate safety measures allow for proactive safety analysis; the analysis is performed prior to crashes occurring. This allows for safety improvements to be implemented proactively to prevent crashes and the associated injuries and property damage. Existing surrogate safety measures primarily rely on data generated by microsimulations, but the advent of connected vehicles has allowed for the incorporation of data from actual cars into safety analysis with surrogate safety measures. In this study, commercially available connected vehicle data are used to develop crash prediction models for crashes at intersections and segments in Salt Lake City, Utah. Harsh braking events are identified and counted within the influence areas of sixty study intersections and thirty segments and then used to develop crash prediction models. Other intersection characteristics are considered as regressor variables in the models, such as intersection geometric characteristics, connected vehicle volumes, and the presence of schools and bus stops in the vicinity. Statistically significant models are developed, and these models may be used as a surrogate safety measure to analyze intersection safety proactively. The findings are applicable to Salt Lake City, but similar research methods may be employed by researchers to determine whether these models are applicable in other cities and to determine how the effectiveness of this method endures through time. Full article

The paper presents a discussion concerning the development of projects regarding active travel with the policy of sustainable mobility, with active school transport in southern Poland being taken into special consideration. The implementation of the idea of sustainable school travel planning involves linking several social groups, including traffic planners and organizers, school administrators, governments, parents, and children. This, in turn, requires considering the criteria reported by all parties when choosing a scenario for the region’s development in terms of transport solutions. The following study was based on the methodological foundations of multicriteria decision-making analysis. The research purpose of this paper is to identify and classify the actions, policies, and scenarios of active travel projects for the sustainable development of mobility based on the cities of southern Poland. The evaluation was carried out through expert methods with multicriteria decision-making tools based on the MULTIPOL (MULTI-criteria and POLicy) prospective analysis technique. It allowed for the selection of the most probable policy, which covered the six actions considered by the experts to be the most significant for the development of the active school transport system in the analyzed region. Such actions are as follows: identification of walking school bus routes, modernization of crosswalk lines, planning of walking and cycling routes to schools, promoting safety educational programs, distribution of active school transport booklets and cycling, and pedestrian skills training workshops. The paper presents a new method to evaluate the policies and actions regarding promoting sustainable (active) travel to school. The innovative approach results from assembling a mixed group of people (stakeholders) as experts. The mix of experts consisting of users (pupils and parents), practitioners, and scientist experts in this field allowed us to score policies, actions, and scenarios, enabling a wider spectrum of assessment than before. Full article

Although the school bus is considered a safe form of transportation, school bus crashes are a major safety concern. School bus crashes are a result of driver error of either the at-fault school bus or another at-fault vehicle (where the school bus is not at fault). To examine the risk factors associated with school bus related crashes and crash outcomes, this study segments and develops two binary logit models for each school bus crash type. A total of 1702 school bus related crashes recorded between 2009 and 2016 were used to estimate the model. According to the model results, sideswipe collisions were less likely to result in injury outcomes for at-fault school buses than rear-end and side-impact collisions. Speeding, driving impaired or under the influence, and negotiating a curve all have significant positive associations with injury outcomes in not-at-fault school bus crashes. This study’s practical implications include enforcing the school bus safe driving guidelines, training programs for school bus drivers that include elements of nonroutine trips, training for crossing guards, and awareness programs for drivers of other vehicles to instill safe driving practices around school buses. Full article

School bus safety has attracted widespread attention with economic development and the improvement of overall quality of the population. However, violations of school bus regulations and school bus-related crashes often occur. Limited research has been conducted on the impact of the school bus stopping process on surrounding drivers’ behavior. This study provides a driving simulator experiment to explore drivers’ behaviors during the school bus stopping process under different traffic law awareness status, traffic volume status, and initial location status. Eight variables about behavior decision and kinetic parameters were assessed for analysis by a logistic regression model and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Results show that the mean speed decreases and the number of people complying with the regulations increases after publicizing the regulations. The proportion of surrounding vehicles in the acceleration state increases, especially under the scenario that the traffic volume is large and the initial distance is far. This indicates that the enforcement of the regulations may stimulate unsafe driving behavior. The findings of this study could help policy makers to better understand the prevalence and compliance of current school bus stopping regulations among drivers and support improvements in the practical application of the regulations. Full article

To avoid problems related to a school bus service such as kidnapping, children being left in a bus for hours leading to fatality, etc., it is important to have a reliable transportation service to ensure students’ safety along journeys. This research presents a high accuracy child monitoring system for locating students if they are inside or outside a school bus using the Internet of Things (IoT) via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) which is suitable for a signal strength indication (RSSI) algorithm. The in/out-bus child tracking system alerts a driver to determine if there is a child left on the bus or not. Distance between devices is analyzed for decision making to affiliate the zone of the current children’s position. A simplified and high accuracy machine learning of least mean square (LMS) algorithm is used in this research with model-based RSSI localization techniques. The distance is calculated with the grid size of 0.5 m × 0.5 m similar in size to an actual seat of a school bus using two zones (inside or outside a school bus). The averaged signal strength is proposed for this research, rather than using the raw value of the signal strength in typical works, providing a robust position-tracking system with high accuracy while maintaining the simplicity of the classical trilateration method leading to precise classification of each student from each zone. The test was performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed tracking strategy which precisely shows the positions of each student. The proposed method, therefore, can be applied for future autopilot school buses where students’ home locations can be securely stored in the system used for references to transport each student to their homes without a driver. Full article

As vulnerable road users, elderly pedestrians are more likely to be injured in road crashes due to declining physical and perceptual capabilities. Most previous studies on the influence of the built environment on elderly pedestrian safety focused on intersections or areal units. Using a district of Shanghai as the study area, this research investigated the effects of the built environment at the road segment level with elderly pedestrian collision, taxi tracking point, point of interest, street view image, open street map, land use, housing price, and elderly population datasets. In particular, this research employed both Poisson and geographically weighted Poisson regression (GWPR) models to account for spatial nonstationarity. The Poisson model indicates that green space, sidewalks, and junctions on the roads significantly affected elderly pedestrian safety, and roads around nursing homes, schools, bus stops, metro stations, traditional markets, and supermarkets were hazardous for elderly pedestrians. The results of the GWPR model suggest that the influence of factors varied across the study area. Green space could decrease the risk of elderly pedestrian collisions only in areas without congested environments. Separations need to be installed between roadways and sidewalks to improve elderly road safety. Full article

This study aims to investigate students’ difficulties in using the bus to get to school based on Rasch analysis and examines students’ innate abilities in handling the barriers. A total of 536 high school students in Yogyakarta were randomly surveyed. This study considers forty barriers of bus use grouped into eight aspects: safety, bus stop reliability, accessibility, mobility, payment system, bus reliability, transfer efficiency, and information and communication technology. The results show that the students experienced 18 main barriers in using the bus. The limited time of travel, circuitous routes, and distance to the bus stops were the three most significant barriers for students in using the bus during the morning commute. Conversely, students reported no difficulty using the bus regarding safety and payment system aspects. This result additionally shows that gender, age, allowance, and drivers’ licenses also influence the extent of the barrier experienced by the students. Finally, some strategies to increase the students’ ability to overcome barriers in utilizing the bus are proposed to create a sustainable public transport system in Yogyakarta. Full article

Due to significant changes in Cairo’s streets today, young children may face difficulties finding opportunities to be safe and active. They can encounter low independent mobility, limiting their access to places in their neighborhoods, and can have poor access to their schools. This study aims to examine governmental primary school children’s access to schools in their neighborhoods after street modifications in Heliopolis, Cairo, seeking to evaluate the potential risks to child pedestrians. This will subsequently aid in developing a methodology for consistently and fairly evaluating hazards along the route to schools. A survey of six governmental primary schools in Heliopolis, Cairo, was conducted through interviews with children and their parents. Furthermore, a behavioral map of the local neighborhood was completed by children (7–12 years old) of six primary schools from the areas surrounding their schools in which the modifications took place. The results indicate that the most common ways of travelling to school, according to the questionnaire, are either by public transportation (30%) or by a small van/private bus (42%). More than half of the children expressed their wish to walk or cycle to school. The result also found that 69% of the children expressed anxiety about crossing streets. In conclusion, for some children, opportunities to be active in the local neighborhood may be limited due to the new modifications to the streets, resulting in limited independent mobility. To promote a sense of neighborhood safety and increase access to neighborhood public spaces, it is important to work with urban planners and local governments. Full article

This study aimed to determine the injury prevention-, safety education-, and violence-related factors pertaining to tooth fracture experience (TFE) in Korean adolescents. We used data from the 14th Korea Youth Risk Behavior Survey (KYRBS) in 2018. The 60,040 participants were selected using a complex sampling design from middle and high schools. The participants completed a self-administered questionnaire. The explanatory variables, including school safety education and violence, were assessed in relation to prevention of traumatic injuries. Complex-samples multivariable logistic regression models were applied to explain the factors related to TFE over the past 12 months. The overall prevalence of TFE was 11.4%. Risk factors related to tooth fractures were not wearing a seatbelt on an express bus, not wearing helmets while riding motorcycles and bicycles, clinical treatment due to injuries at school, injuries associated with earphone/smartphones use, and lack of school safety education such as danger evacuation training. The top risk factor was injuries associated with earphone/smartphone usage, followed by lack of familiarity with school safety education. Thus, to prevent tooth fractures among adolescents, schools should strengthen their safety education, including education regarding mobile device usage, and wearing a seatbelt and wearing a helmet. Care should be taken to manage facilities around the school and to prevent injury related to tooth fracture. Further studies on various risk factors related to tooth fractures are warranted. Full article

Walking School Buses (WSBs), organized groups for children to walk to school under the supervision of adults, help reduce traffic congestion and contribute towards exercise. Routes are based largely on need, traffic safety and travel time, with exposure to air pollution not generally considered. This paper explores whether reductions in exposure can be achieved based on the side of the road travelled using data collected in Auckland, New Zealand. Exposure to air pollution was measured for a 25-min commute consisting of a 10-min segment along a quiet cul-de-sac and a 15-min segment along a main arterial road with traffic congestion heavier in one direction. Two participants were each equipped with a portable P-Trak ultrafine particle monitor and a portable Langan carbon monoxide monitor, and walked the route on opposite sides of the road simultaneously, for both morning and afternoon, logging 10-s data. The results suggest that pedestrians travelling on the footpath next to the less congested side of the road in the morning avoid many short-term peaks in concentration and experience significantly lower mean exposures than those travelling on the footpath next to the more congested side. Significant reductions in air pollution exposure could be made for children by taking into account the side of the road in WSB route design. Full article

In the last few years, the number of private cars has expanding quickly in China, more and more parents use cars to escort their children to school, thus cause serious traffic congestions near school in many cities. In this paper, we developed an agent-based model (ABM) of the parents’ choice of escort mode. The core of this model is an escort mode choice motivation adjustment function that combines distance, traffic safety and social influence. We also used ABM to exhibit the emergent decoy effect phenomenon, which is a dynamic phenomenon that the introduction of a decoy to the choice-set could increase the share of other alternatives. The model reveals the parents’ inner psychological mechanism when facing competing escort mode choice in transportation system. The simulation results show that the proportion of parents to choose bus escort was 62.45% without the decoy effect was introduced, while the proportion of parents to choose bus escort increased to 74.29% with the decoy effect was entry. The use of the ABM method gives the potential to cope with the dynamic changes in studying parent escort mode choice behavior. Full article

China has a historic system of wide cycle tracks, many of which are now encroached by cars, buses and bus stops. Even with these conditions, college students still bicycle. On campuses, students park their bikes on facilities ranging from kick-stand-plazas to caged sheds with racks, pumps and an attendant. In other countries, including Canada, some of the newer cycle tracks need to be wider to accommodate an increasing number of bicyclists. Other countries will also need to improve their bike parking, which includes garage-basement cages and two-tiered racks. China could provide lessons about cycle tracks and bike parking. This study applied the Maslow Transportation Level of Service (LOS) theory, i.e., for cycle tracks and bike parking, only after the basic needs of safety and security are met for both vehicle occupants and bicyclists can the higher needs of convenience and comfort be met. With random clustering, a self-administered questionnaire was collected from 410 students in six dormitory buildings at Peking University in Beijing and an environmental scan of bicycle parking conducted in school/office and living areas. Cycle tracks (1 = very safe/5 = very unsafe) shared with moving cars were most unsafe (mean = 4.6), followed by sharing with parked cars (4.1) or bus stop users (4.1) (p < 0.001). Close to half thought campus bike parking lacked order. The most suggested parking facilities were sheds, security (guard or camera), bicycle racks and bicycle parking services (pumps, etc.). If parking were improved, three quarters indicated they would bicycle more. While caged sheds were preferred, in living areas with 1597 parked bikes, caged sheds were only 74.4% occupied. For the future of China’s wide cycle tracks, perhaps a fence-separated bus lane beside a cycle track might be considered or, with China’s recent increase in bike riding, shared bikes and E-bikes, perhaps cars/buses could be banned from the wide cycle tracks. In other countries, a widened cycle track entrance should deter cars. Everywhere, bike parking sheds could be built and redesigned with painted lines to offer more space and order, similar to car parking. Full article