| Abstract: |
School environments are priority areas for the health and well-being of children and their families. Urban planning interventions that improve school environments can improve the quality of these spaces through traffic calming, the incorporation of urban furniture, vegetation and the removal of parking spaces. This report summarizes the results of a work that aims to evaluate some of the transformations carried out within the framework of the program Protegim Les Escoles (Let's Protect Schools) of the Barcelona City Council. This initiative started in 2020 with 26 schools, 76 schools in 2021, 76 schools in 2022 and a forecast of 18 schools in 2023. Specifically, we analyze the transformations produced in twenty-eight pacified streets in the summer of 2021 with a pre-post comparison with control environments. We evaluate the changes in five dimensions: use of public space, pedestrian flow and movement, play, traffic and air quality. We concentrate on assessing the actions of pacification. We distinguish two pacification strategies, those that include a motorized vehicle stop (total stop) and those pacifications that allow coexistence with traffic in a pacified context (partial stop). For each school benefiting from road calming, we selected a control school to improve the quality of the study. Overall, all the schools analyzed show improvements in some of the dimensions observed. We observed a traffic reduction of 79% in all the actions and a reduction of almost 90% in the streets that benefited from total pacification. The most notable transformations are found in the streets with total pacification, where the action has blocked the road to motorized vehicles. We highlight the interventions in Fígols street in front of the Lavínia School, in Baixada de Can Mateu street in front of the Carabassa school and the pacification of Leiva street in front of the Arts School Institute for its impact on the transformation of the use of public space. In the schools with total walls, we observe that the use of public space is tripled. We observe more movement of pedestrians in the intervention streets but not significantly more than in the control schools. We observe more play in the streets, especially in Fígols, Leiva and Baixada Can Mateu streets. We see how the elimination of traffic is a necessary condition for the game to occupy the street, but it does not guarantee it on its own. Finally, improvements in air quality (NO2) are appreciated, especially in Fígols street where the reduction of traffic was also substantial. Significant improvements in air quality can bring important benefits in the short or long term for children and adolescents. We also find methodological lessons, where the analysis highlights the importance of conducting observations in control schools. Due to the exit of the pandemic, in 2022 we have observed more movement than in 2021, a fact that has shown that the use of control schools is essential to be able to correctly attribute the observed changes to the Protegim Les Escoles program. |
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