Traffic calming in the vicinity of schools

Abstract

In the last century, roads have been replaced for vehicles and became widened and straightened. These changes help vehicles go faster but make the condition more dangerous for other activities such as walking or cycling. The safety of school children walking to and from school is a major concern to parents, teachers, law enforcement agencies and the general community. Identifying problems and implementing improvements from the bulk of activities at relevant agencies in their effort to reduce child pedestrian injuries around schools. This includes traffic engineering approaches such as traffic calming measures, to improve the safety of school children walking along or crossing busy streets around school areas. Traffic calming has been used extensively in residential and commercial areas but it is generally unknown how effective traffic calming is in school areas. With all the effort done in implementing traffic calming around school area, there are still occurrences of accidents involving school children around the vicinity of schools in Malaysia. In this research the objectives are to find out the most common type of traffic calming in schools? area and identifying the other factors that affect traffic calming to influence better. This study covers the entire Taman Universiti region in Skudai town where seven schools exist. Based on the specific criterions three schools have been sampled that all were primary and the existing condition and the traffic calming that was installed have been surveyed based on observation method, afterward; according to the result of data collection and data analysis the new suggestions have been proposed.