Could traffic survey data help reduce school traffic chaos?
It’s one of the most emotive road safety issues of our time: how to keep children and other road users safe at school drop-off and pick-up times, when traffic is busy, and drivers often distracted. The AA Populous Motoring Panel traffic survey for April 2016 found that 57% of those surveyed who had school-age children said that there is often traffic chaos near the school their children attended.
There are a number of ways that surveys could help to ease traffic problems at these vulnerable locations. Both traffic and parking surveys can be used to collect and analyse data on the quantity of traffic using the roads at key times – and compare them with the volume at off-peak periods. And because parking is often one of the reasons why traffic gets so quickly snarled up around these times, it makes sense to look at parking options, including providing dedicated parking, offering rolling drop-off times so that children aren’t all coming to school at the same time, and imposing parking restrictions around the immediate vicinity of the school, so that roads and junctions are kept clear.
These types of traffic volume study and parking analysis can be used to inform changes to the road system, and to demonstrate the impact of further developments in and around the school area, including increasing the pupil intake at the school, and building new housing developments nearby. Local planners may also choose to put in traffic calming measures such as priority lanes, speed bumps and lower speed limits, to encourage safer and slower driving. In addition, for those schools with a wider catchment area, traffic surveys can help to boost plans for additional bus services, helping to reduce the number of cars travelling to school at any one time. Match this with car-share schemes, encouragement to walk or cycle to school rather than travel by car, and even diverting non-school traffic from nearby roads at key times, and it’s easy to see how good quality data can help to influence positive road safety changes.
Bespoke traffic surveys from RDS
At Road Data Services, we specialise in collecting a wide range of traffic survey data, parking, pedestrian and journey time data, using a range of reliable methods. These result in good quality data that can be reported in the way that’s best for your project, helping you to make a strong case for a change in the existing road system, plans to develop or create new road systems, or just to show that the current system is actually the best one for the circumstances. To find out more about how we can help, just contact us today.
