So can trips to school be made more active

More cycling, walking and movement. Less cars and emissions. With better traffic safety as a bonus. These are the goal of the green travel plans the municipality is working on for Linköping’s schools.

Fridtunaskolan in the T1 area in Linköping a few days before the summer holidays. Fifteen minutes remain until the next meeting. Johanna Thidell, an environmental coordinator at the Environment and Urban Development Administration (miljö- och samhällsbyggnadsförvaltningen), explains what has been done to improve the traffic situation around the school which has pupils from pre-school class to year six. Quite a lot, in fact.

What used to be an open area where children, adults and cars flowed more or less freely, is now a clearly demarcated turning area. Right next to it is a new pedestrian crossing with a bicycle crossing and a speed bump. And along the entire road, there is a wide pavement with plenty of room for both adults and children.

“The pavement is perhaps the best, I think. And it is forbidden to stop along this entire stretch. Parents who come by car should drop their children off over there,” says Johanna Thidell, pointing a bit further down along Fridtunagatan.

You can get to the other side of the school quickly at a fast pace. The school is big. On a bike path, which actually runs across the schoolyard, there is now an instruction painted on the asphalt: “Cycle slowly. Children at play”.

“We thought a lot about what we should do regarding cycling. We want to encourage more children to start cycling. But in this respect, many teachers and parents thought it was a bit scary when bikes were whizzing past close to children at play, and that is why we did this,” says Johanna Thidell before she has to rush off to the next meeting.

Fridtunaskolan was Linköping’s first school to receive a so-called green travel plan. The traffic situation around the school has been, and still is, quite complicated. Heavy traffic is routed to the construction works in the Ebbepark area and regular travel routes can be closed off when a new construction project starts. When the school’s new premises opened in 2022, the teachers and the headmaster were out directing the traffic.

The goal of the green travel plans is simply that as many children as possible should walk, cycle, or take the bus to school. This, in turn, will lead to better road safety, better travel and movement habits for pupils, and reduced emissions, as fewer people will travel by car. A win-win-win, in other words.

“Cycling means freedom and we know that children enjoy cycling. Parents are often a little anxious and feel that it is safer to drive their children to school. It’s a vicious circle where more and more people take the car, thus making traffic denser and more dangerous,” says Johanna Thidell.

The work on green travel plans includes “hard” and “soft” measures, such as changing the physical infrastructure, providing information, and talking to people. A fundamental aspect of the projects, and what is now the beginning of the work with these new plans, is that the pupils themselves get to mark out how they get to school and point out dangerous places or areas to be wary of along the road. The municipality has developed an IT tool where these maps then form the basis for the measures taken.

“The youngest children have also been allowed to mark out the places they like. It could be a nice tree, a football pitch or something else. Many people also tend to put a heart next to the school,” says Johanna Thidell, displaying one of the school route maps on her computer.

After Fridtunaskolan, work is currently underway on green travel plans for Ånestadsskolan and Kvinnebyskolan. This autumn, work will also begin with the schools in Vikingstad. An important task in the coming years will be to follow up and evaluate the work – have the green travel plans changed how people travel and if so, how?

Text: Mikael Sönne