Safe and sustainable access to schools Building national capacity and support  for the 15min City
Creators: name: Cornet, Yannick
name: Ľuboš, Buzna
name: Eva, Malichová
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: The 15minC concept at its core integrates land use and transport planning. It is a powerful enabler to redesign cities around the concept of proximity (land use planning) and the sustainable mobility pyramid (giving priority to active mobillity and public transport in mobility planning). In practice, cities face concrete problems that can be inspired by the 15minC concept, but require more focussed thinking.
In Slovakia, we identified a common problem faced by many neighbourhoods to address the issue of the growing number of parents driving their children to school. Many neighbourhoods were already developped with 15minC characteristics under the past communist regime in the 60s, consisting of walkable neighbourhoods, compact housing (usually 6 to 10 levels), plenty of green spaces, schools, shopping and playgrounds situated in proximity. However these neighbourhoods do not accomodate the car easily, creating much congestion in and out of them, expecially in the morning - residents wanting to exit to go to work by car, and parents entering wanting to drop their kids at the doorstep of the school which is usually located in the centre of these neighbourhoods and at the end of narrow roads. This creates traffic, air and noise pollution, an unsafe environment for children coming by other means, and wasted time for all. The natural answer is to build another road or some kind of drop-off area usually by encoraching even further on the remaining public space (trees, playgrounds etc). There is an underlying mindset that access by car (as well as parking a car) is a kind of fundamental human right.
However, few cities are trying to join forces in taking a wider perspective on the problem and possible interventions. This is the case for the Vlcince neighbourhood of Zilina, which I propose to present and discuss. A meeting was held between parents and residents to assess the proposed solutions, where the outcome was that building a new road was firmly rejected, and the preference for building a drop-off zone few hundred meters away on the main road was strongly prefered. A survey was developped to better understand parents needs, their reasons for taking the car, and the kind of interventions that could possibly encourage them to drop their children by other means. A mapping of the residence of all families (and their distance to school) was already done using GIS.
The next step will be to reflect on the types of interventions that could first help make walking, cycling, public transport, or a combination thereof, to become more safe and attractive as the natural and most efficient way of bringing their children to school in a safe and healthy fashion. The other aspect which has not been talked yet are the actual needs and preferences of children themselves - and how to collect them.
Within the CapaCITIES project, we aim to support the city in designing and testing a reproducible approach for addressing this issue on one hand, and on the other create a supportive national network to share good practices within the Union of Town and Cities of Slovakia net