A60 Can Creating Livable and Complete Streets Improve Children’s Spatial Knowledge? A Cognitive Mapping Study of the Influence of Traffic and Safe Routes to School (SR2S) Projects on Schoolchildren in a US Suburban Context

Abstract

Abstract Background How do children view their world? What helps them connect with their environment and community? Or, perhaps more importantly, what gets in their way? These are questions that need to be addressed when working to make neighborhoods and streets around schools safe and inviting to children (and their parents) so they can freely walk and/or bicycle to access their education. Building on these safety and physical activity and benefits, this research examines how Safe Routes to School infrastructure (adequate facilities for walking, bicycling and traffic calming), by making neighborhood streets not only safe but comfortable and inviting—in other words, livable—children may be able to progress further along a continuum of cognitive spatial knowledge development. Methods This paper presents the findings of a series of comparative cognitive mapping exercises with 9 and ten-year old schoolchildren to reveal how exposure to traffic--varying by volume, speed, and active travel infrastructure supporting walking and bicycling—influences the development of their spatial knowledge. The results reveal multi-dimensional effects, as well as how constructing safe-routes-to-school improvements (pathways and crosswalks) can potentially strengthen schoolchildren’s progression along a cognitive development continuum. This study focuses on suburban neighborhoods (in the US) with schools placed within walking distance of the majority of children, but lacking key elements to making them truly walkable (sidewalks and direct pathways). This makes them potentially strong candidates for achieving cost-effective benefits from Safe Routes to School (SR2S) improvement projects. This paper additionally presents a brief historical analysis of how such neighborhoods came to be. Results The maps compiled and analyzed in this research show that as exposure to auto traffic volumes and speed decreases, a child’s sense of threat goes down, and his/her ability to establish a higher degree of spatial knowledge as a richer cognitive connection with their community rises. Without pedestrian and bicycle facilities to provide sanctuary for a child from automobile traffic, the negative senses of danger and dislike appear to limits children’s ability to identify the qualities of their neighborhood that are memorable, special, or even positive. Conclusions Retrofitting the Incomplete Neighborhood’s (INs) identified in this study presents an exceptional opportunity for making cost-effective infrastructure investments as schools in these neighborhoods are actually within walking and bicycling distance of schoolchildren— therefore investments to facilitate safe and livable access to school may be small in relation to the relatively large number of children who can gain important safe & livable, and hence inviting access to school. Finally, cognitive mapping exercises like this provide valuable way for children to express their views of the world, and for identifying and assessing the problems and opportunities experienced by children along the routes to school (e.g., important destinations, secret paths, preferred travel routes, and existing barriers). In turn, they can help community members, public staff and policymakers identify and articulate the most cost-effective solutions to making neighborhoods and streets safer and more livable for the children.