Safe School Streets

The Safe School Streets programme involves tactical urbanism trials at 13 Auckland primary schools, providing safer routes to school for more than 5,000 children aged 5-11. Each project aims to increase safety outside the school, reduce the number of vehicles during peak times and encourage more students and their families to walk and cycle to and from school each day.

Safe School Streets began as a pilot programme, testing a tactical urbanism methodology relatively new for transport project delivery in New Zealand. This methodology followed one-day TMP-based trials and multi-month ‘interim’ trials of installed temporary street infrastructure. The lessons learnt from trials then inform possible long-term permanent changes. The diversity of street and social contexts has generated significant learning within the team about how to provide safety improvements that encourage walking and cycling at schools.

Crank is managing the delivery of all thirteen projects and the Safe Schools programme as a whole. We’re also supporting a range of communication and engagement activities that are led by internal AT teams.

Project Management

Crank is managing the delivery of each Safe Schools project and the programme as a whole. This has involved coordinating inputs from a multidisciplinary consultant team comprising designers, engineers, technical specialists, monitoring & evaluation consultants, and Communication & Engagement and Community Transport teams at Auckland Transport.

As tactical urbanism, each Safe School Streets project has been delivered at a pace much faster than traditional transport project delivery - from initiation to completion in 12-18 months. This pace has required innovation in many processes that wrap around transport project delivery. Crank has provided input into approaches for materials and contractor procurement and internal reviews and approvals.

‍Communication & engagement

With thirteen projects, Safe Schools has a diverse range of street and social contexts and many stakeholders: community members, school leadership, multiple Local Boards, Council departments, and government development agencies.

Crank has led or supported engagement with many stakeholders, from close working relationships with school leaders to on-street meetings with resident groups to aligning delivery with adjacent Kainga Ora developments.

Tactical urbanism also requires responsiveness to community feedback on trials. Crank worked with the consultant team to develop a methodology to refine trials within days or a few weeks of receiving ‘Have Your Say’ responses.

‍Apps and systems

Delivering multiple concurrent projects at the pace of Safe Schools required Crank to create systems to support some key project activities at scale:

• Materials procurement. Crank created a system for materials aggregation that enabled forecasting of material requirements at early design stages across all thirteen sites and then supported the refinement of materials volumes and costs as the design progressed.‍
• Feedback triaging. Crank built a prototype app that allowed project team members to record on-street observations, combined with community feedback in a triaging system. This system enabled Crank to process hundreds of pieces of feedback across the thirteen sites, reducing the time to refine the trials and providing insight into patterns across all projects.

All thirteen trials are in place on the streets around schools, and almost all have completed refinements based on feedback from school communities and project team observations. The evaluation of all trials will be spread over late-2021 and early-2022.

The first trial to be installed is now undergoing a transition to a permanent scheme (ref. image below). This follows the evaluation of the trial with the school community that found that twice as many parents felt it was safe for their children to walk or cycle to school following the installation of the trial elements.