We need your help! Support the next phase of an exciting technology being developed by the Active and Safe Routes to School Program at Green Action Centre. We have applied for the Aviva Community Fund and we’d like you to vote for our project.
You can vote once per day until October 14th — please share with your networks and friends.
How CounterPoint Works: Set up a counterpoint. Do a count. Count again later.
It’s that simple.
Our project will be drawing on a robust international network of professionals, advocates and schools around the world to help crowdsource critical traffic data that matters to everyone.
What is an environmental non-profit dealing with school travel doing hiring software programmers and graphic designers? Nothing less than forging a new way of seeing, planning, and building our communities. We are taking a traditional traffic engineer’s tools, making them better, making them work for kids, and giving them back to both.
The problem: Many communities have been hard-wired to prioritize the car. The facts make this obvious. The number of children walking or biking to school is steadily dropping. Simply put, many many places have higher speeds, missing pathways, scary intersections, non-existent bike infrastructure and more and more traffic. The devastating and cumulative health, environmental and financial effects are well-known.
The opportunity: Schools, towns, cities and countries are starting to take a much harder look at planning for active transportation. Bike/walk planning is starting to become “a thing”. Millions of schoolchildren are involved in the Safe Routes to School program worldwide. Communities from Thompson, MB to Quispampsis, NB are eager for change.
At the same time, new technologies have changed the way we do everything – from talking, to navigating to meeting our special other. How ’bout if we use that power to change the way we look at transportation?
The challenge: In general, government planners know almost nothing about the traffic patterns of pedestrians and bikes. In this case, how do you prove the worth of a given project? People are bombarded with info and want to do more than complain to a politician. How do you get kids, families, volunteers and schools MEANINGFULLY involved in how their streets work? What if YOU wanted to start doing something meaningful to help improve a street near you TODAY?
The solution: Get them to count traffic. Make it fun. Make it easy. Make it so that a class of fifth graders can create a baseline survey in a day. Make it so that the friendly bike guy down the street can get involved too.
Imagine a few high school students learning statistics by monitoring traffic in their own neighbourhood year after year. Imagine that same data being used by city planners to plan the streets.
Imagine waiting for a bus, and spending 10 minutes on Counterpoint to help make the case for the bike lanes you’d love to see.
As the interest has grown, and the possibilities have become clearer, Green Action Centre’s Active and Safe Routes to School Program is currently seeking funding to support Phase Three of this innovative and exciting project.
We are extremely excited and optimistic about the growing interest and support for the development of this App.
Our project has been presented and featured at the Winter Cycling Congress in Oulu, Finland, Velo-City 2013 in Vienna, Austria, the National Safe Routes to School Conference in Sacramento California, and at Walk 21 in Munich.
For more information about School Travel Planning and to learn more about how the electronic adaptation of survey tools and resources benefits the process, please visit www.greenactioncentre.ca/asrts.
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