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With the digital school route planner on schulwege.de, parents and children can research safer routes to school throughout Germany. The routing function is based on a traffic safety map that uses an automated risk calculation to show dangerous road sections.
There are around 32,000 schools in Germany. The majority of schools do not have a school route plan to navigate children safely to school, and existing plans often have the problem that they are static or no longer up to date. Children are particularly worthy of protection as they are inexperienced in traffic and are considered to be particularly vulnerable to motorized traffic. At the same time, there is the problem that fewer and fewer children are walking to school independently due to "parent cabs". According to a 2020 study[1] on the topic of "Safe routes to school", the most frequently cited reason (77% of respondents) why many parents drive their children to school is that they consider the road infrastructure to be too unsafe and therefore prefer to take their children to school by "parent cab".
[1] Source: Kinderhilfswerk, VCD, VBE - representative survey from September 2020
As part of the FeGiS+ research project on "Early detection of danger spots in road traffic using smart data", a methodology was developed to detect danger spots at an early stage, if possible before accidents occur. In addition to accident data, other data sources are also used, such as crowdsourcing data from road users on their experiences and braking data from vehicles. This has resulted in a road safety map, which can be viewed at www.gefahrenstellen.de[1], which assesses the entire road network (urban and extra-urban) according to risk level, even in areas where no serious accidents may have occurred to date. The methodology is scientifically sound[2] and also received 2 awards[3 ] from the European Commission at the end of 2022.
The above-mentioned road safety map provides the basis for the "Digital School Route Planner", which was designed as a user-friendly application for children, parents, schools and municipalities, in cooperation with RWTH Aachen University and the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology "HeiGIT" at Heidelberg University. A smart routing function was integrated into the digital school route map via HeiGIT. Here, routes can be researched…
It is expressly desired that citizens proactively report critical situations in road traffic and near-accidents via the report button on schulwege.de. The reports are evaluated automatically and can influence the risk assessment of the road section from a certain level of interaction. In this way, the data situation can always be kept up to date and new danger spots can be identified. Comprehensive press work such as newspaper articles and online reports as well as e-mail distribution lists at schools are used to encourage reporting.
