School Zones Research Articles

School Zone: A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization

School Zone: A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization

PENERAPAN KEBIJAKAN PENERIMAAN PESERTA DIDIK BARU DENGAN SISTEM ZONASI PADA TINGKAT SEKOLAH MENENGAH ATAS DI KOTA BATAM

This study aims to analyze the implementation of school zoning policies in high school PPDB (New Student Acceptance) in Batam city, evaluate their impact on equal distribution of access to education, and identify challenges faced in its implementation. The research method used is a qualitative method with a descriptive approach. The data used in this study were collected from interviews with related parties and collected data from various reliable sources. The results of the study show that the implementation of the PPDB zoning system in Batam City has had a positive impact in achieving equal access to education by prioritizing students from each school zone. However, this research also identified several challenges, such as adaptation to various local conditions and the importance of active community involvement in implementing this policy. This research contributes to understanding the implementation of the PPDB policy with the zoning system in Batam City and provides recommendations for policy improvement and further development in order to achieve equal and fair access to education for all students in Batam city.

Effects of tougher school zone laws on road traffic safety in school zones for children in South Korea

IntroductionNew school zone laws in Korea were enforced in March 2020 to increase penalties for traffic violations and preferentially install road safety equipment including automated traffic enforcement devices in school zones. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of tougher school zone laws on school-zone-related road traffic outcome (RTO) rates for children aged 0–12 years in Korea. MethodsMonthly child RTO rates in school zones were calculated per million vehicles and per million children using data on police-reported road traffic crashes, registered motor vehicles, and registered resident population between 2015 and 2021: the intervention series involved school-zone-related rates and the non-equivalent control series involved total and non-school-zone-related rates. The effectiveness of the laws on RTO rates in school zones was assessed using the Bayesian structural time-series models under the controlled interrupted time-series design. ResultsThe results found that considering the trends in the overall and non-school-zone-related RTO rates, enforcement of the laws did not significantly reduce any school-zone-related RTO rates for children aged 0–12 years, both per million vehicles and per million children: equivalent fatality, road traffic injury (RTI), severe RTI, minor RTI, and road traffic crash rates. ConclusionsThe ineffectiveness of Korea's new school zone laws on child RTO rates in school zones implies that other effective measures need to be accompanied to improve children's road traffic safety in school zones, rather than just focusing on raising the severity of punishment. Further research is needed to ensure the effectiveness of school zone laws and measures to mitigate child road traffic casualties in school zones.

Detecting School Zones on Florida’s Public Roadways Using Aerial Images and Artificial Intelligence (AI2)

Collecting up-to-date roadway geometry data is essential for transportation agencies so they can undertake planning, maintenance, design, and rehabilitation of roadways. Collection methods can be categorized into two distinct groups: land-based methods (e.g., field inventories, mobile mapping, and image logging); and aerial-based methods (e.g., satellite imagery, drones, and laser scanning). Because using land-based methods for thousands of miles of highways is tedious, costly, and risky for crew members, there is a need to develop better methodologies to collect these data faster, and more safely and cheaply. The increasing availability of high-resolution images and recent advances in computer vision and object detection techniques have enabled the automated extraction of roadway geometry features. This novel study proposes a computer vision-based methodology to detect school zone pavement markings from high-resolution aerial images and determine school zones on Florida’s public roadways. This is critical information for transportation agencies, and they use it for a variety of different purposes: identifying those markings that are old and invisible; comparing the school zone locations with other geometric features such as crosswalks; and analyzing crashes that occur around the zones. Compared with the ground truth data obtained for Leon County, Florida, 94% accuracy was observed at the 90% confidence level. The model was then used to detect school zones in Orange County, Florida, and approximately 500 school zone markings were identified automatically. The road geometry data extracted can be integrated with crash and traffic data to advise policymakers and roadway users.

Assessment of Dynamic Object Information Utilization Service in a Control Center for Each Urban Scale via Fuzzy AHP

Recently, the demand for citizen-sensible service solutions such as traffic, crime prevention, and disasters in smart cities is increasing. In order to provide technology-based smart city services, local government control centers could be utilized. Accordingly, this paper presented a method for selecting a control center-based dynamic object information utilization service model through in-depth interviews with 26 related local government control center operation personnel. A comparative analysis according to the size of the local government to which the evaluator belongs was also performed. As a methodology, Fuzzy AHP was used, which can support rational decision-making by mathematically expressing ambiguous phenomena such as subjective and uncertain judgments. The summary of the research results is as follows. Services related to recent incidents in South Korea (e.g., school zone traffic accidents and lowland inundation) were identified as very important. These social issues are significant factors in policy decisions. In comparing the results for each urban scale, the importance of pedestrian safety services on backside roads and main road traffic services was found to be important in the metropolitan area and regional, medium, and small cities, respectively. This was attributed to metropolitan cities with high population density, and medium and small cities experiencing alienated traffic information. In metropolitan areas, new services are highly important owing to the demand for a more scientific control service and future mobility based on a sound control infrastructure. In medium and small cities, facility management services were assessed relatively highly owing to the poor conditions of regional cities with a lack of supervising personnel in the field and a lack of surveillance system infrastructure. This paper was able to confirm the difference in service preference by city size, and it is necessary to select the optimal service model considering these results.

An integer programming model for the deployment of mobile health clinics

Facility location and resource allocation play an essential role in the operational management of mobile health clinics (MHCs) as optimization of both can help medical service providers improve their service coverage under limited resources. In this paper, we consider the issue of maximizing the coverage of immunization services provided by MHCs in vulnerable communities such as school zones and census tracts. Since demand in communities overlaps with neighboring communities, this leads to the so-called mobile facility location with overlapped demand (MFL-OD). To capture the overlapped demand in different communities, we introduce a novel integer programming model with linear and bilinear constraints (BLCIP) and show that the BLCIP model is NP-hard. A polynomial-time approximation algorithm is proposed for the BLCIP, and the approximation ratio of the obtained solution is estimated. We implement the proposed model and approximation algorithm for a case study in the Houston Independent School District and its associated communities. Preliminary experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model and the efficiency of the proposed approximation method.

The effect of school zone on housing prices: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in New Zealand

We analyse a quasi-experiment where a much sought-after state secondary school with no close substitutes unexpectedly reduced its enrolment zone twice over a three-year period. We use difference-in-differences to estimate the impact of the two downsizings on housing sales prices. We use controls for housing characteristics for pooled cross section or housing fixed effects for repeat sales, test for parallel trends, and conduct numerous robustness checks. In our main analysis, we find the first downsizing may decrease housing prices between 3.2% and 12.9%, with most estimates statistically significant, while the second downsizing may decrease prices between 2.1% and 7.2%, with most estimates insignificant. Tests in the pre-treatment period suggest parallel trends cannot be rejected, though some cross section interactions are significant when the two downsizings are analysed separately. We conclude the school zone’s first downsizing likely had a negative effect on housing prices of a small to moderate magnitude.

Investigating the effects of left-turn distracted drivers on signalized intersections’ traffic operations

Distracted driving represents a serious obstacle to maintaining an efficient transportation system. The safety impacts of distracted driving had been thoroughly explored. However, the traffic operations impact has received less attention. Few studies addressed distracted driving behaviors in through lanes, but less focus has been provided on the left turners. The goal of this study is to fill this gap in the research and address the impact of distracted driving for left turners on traffic operations at signalized intersections. Field data were collected from six (6) intersections, with thousands of observations analyzed in Orange County, Florida, studying different land use, lane configurations, and peak periods. The results demonstrated that 87% of all drivers were distracted. 28% were distracted by cell phone usage and showed significant effect only during the AM peak. During the PM peak, talking to passengers and dashboard categories were significant. In all peak periods, the category of “not identified” distractions was dominant (48%), indicating drivers not paying attention and staring through the windshield. Drivers in the first row in the queue experienced more distractions in the PM peak than in the AM peak. Motorists in residential & school land use had lower headway than those in mixed land use. This can be attributed to motorists' cautious driving behavior due to the existence of school zones and pedestrian crossings. In contrast, motorists in mixed land use tend to be more distracted by the commercial and tourist areas. The statistical models demonstrated that the overall effect of distracted drivers in the left lanes on the discharge headway at signalized intersections is significant. The TOD analysis showed that the distractions increased the headway by 40%, 37%, and 43% during the AM, MD and PM peak hours, respectively. Conversely, the overall distractions model results showed that the base headway increased by 40% resulting in reducing the intersection’s capacity by 30%.

Implementasi Sistem Zonasi dalam Penerimaan Siswa Baru di Kecamatan Tellulimpoe Kabupaten Sinjai

The division of the zone system in student admissions gets various responses from the community. The community thinks that the zone system can limit students' creativity in choosing schools that are of interest to students. The research method used is descriptive qualitative by conducting in-depth interviews with students, school principals and parents of students. The research findings are (1). The zone system carried out by the school is in accordance with the procedures and mechanisms implemented. (2). Lack of socialization from the Office of Occupation and Culture or the school so that parents can find out the division of school zones in each region.

Utilizing High Resolution Satellite Imagery for Automated Road Infrastructure Safety Assessments.

The European Commission (EC) has published a European Union (EU) Road Safety Framework for the period 2021 to 2030 to reduce road fatalities. In addition, the EC with the EU Directive 2019/1936 requires a much more detailed recording of road attributes. Therefore, automatic detection of school routes, four classes of crosswalks, and divided carriageways were performed in this paper. The study integrated satellite imagery as a data source and the Yolo object detector. The satellite Pleiades Neo 3 with a spatial resolution of 0.3 m was used as the source for the satellite images. In addition, the study was divided into three phases: vector processing, satellite imagery processing, and training and evaluation of the You Only Look Once (Yolo) object detector. The training process was performed on 1951 images with 2515 samples, while the evaluation was performed on 651 images with 862 samples. For school zones and divided carriageways, this study achieved accuracies of 0.988 and 0.950, respectively. For crosswalks, this study also achieved similar or better results than similar work, with accuracies ranging from 0.957 to 0.988. The study also provided the standard performance measure for object recognition, mean average precision (mAP), as well as the values for the confusion matrix, precision, recall, and f1 score for each class as benchmark values for future studies.

Predicting injury-severity for cyclist crashes using natural language processing and neural network modelling

The use of machine learning techniques in safety research has increased as has the interest in using new data sources. This study’s unique contribution is the application of text mining—focusing on perceived cyclist safety and crash occurrence in an urban environment. We analysed crash data collected by the emergency forces in the Capital Region of Denmark from 2013 to 2017 and self-reported textual data provided by cyclists from 2018 to 2019. The analysis included natural language processing and topic modelling to identify Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topics from self-reports, representing environment characteristics that cyclists’ perceive as unsafe. A multi-output neural network regression model is applied to predict the injury-severity distribution of cyclists involved in crashes (measured by emergency response level [ERL]) based on the obtained topic distributions together with additional variables like cycle flow. We identified six LDA topics which address buses and cycle paths, conflicts with parked cars, roundabouts and inadequate maintenance, fast-moving cars and lack of cycle path, school zones and heavy traffic, and intersections and interactions with vehicles. Cycle flow was found to be the highest impacter on ERL prediction. However, other factors also impacted ERLs, especially school zones and heavy traffic. The results bring new insights into safety perception and actual safety for cyclists. The results contribute to a novel procedure for the joint correlation analysis using machine learning techniques on self-reported textual data thereby providing a better tool for infrastructure planning. The findings show the importance of including perceived safety in crash modelling and that authorities should focus on safety around schools and in intersections in order to improve safety for cyclists in a urban environment.

Opinions of active transportation users on policies to ensure their perceived safety in the era of autonomous vehicles

Active transportation users, including pedestrians and bicyclists, have expressed significant safety concerns over the co-existence of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the road in the future. However, insufficient emphasis has been paid to exploring the demands of safety-related public policies with empirical evidence, and even much of the previous literature has not fully incorporated the viewpoints of the active transportation users. Thus, this study explored the opinions of active transportation users on five safety-related policies in the era of AVs: (1) a speed limit restriction (policy 1), (2) human-occupied AVs at all times (policy 2), (3) active engagement of human drivers in school zones (policy 3), (4) trip-related data sharing (policy 4), and (5) AV technology-related data sharing (policy 5). This study developed five multinomial logit models using the 2019 BikePGH survey data collected in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and revealed the following main findings. First, active transportation users who reported feeling extremely safe when sharing the road with AVs were significantly more likely to believe that none of the five policies were necessary. However, those who believed AVs would harm traffic injuries and fatalities favored policies 2 and 3. Also, those negatively affected by the fatal crash in Arizona expressed the need for policies 1 and 2. Additionally, those who have shared the road with AVs believed that policies 1, 2, and 3 were crucial. This research will benefit AV stakeholders, particularly transportation officials and planners, as it will offer guidelines to ensure the perceived safety of vulnerable road users and make roads safer for them in the AV era.

Turning around schools (and neighborhoods?): School improvement grants and gentrification

Most funding intended to close gaps in K-12 education targets schools, rather than students directly. We investigate whether household sorting in response to changes in K-12 school funding inhibits spending from reaching targeted students with a case study in Metro-Nashville Public Schools of the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, which invested $7 billion in the nation’s lowest-achieving schools between 2009 and 2016. Using a boundary-discontinuity difference-in-differences design and home sales data, we estimate that households were willing to pay more than three times the average per-pupil grant award to live in SIG school zones. Neighborhoods zoned for SIG schools experienced moderate income and racial integration following funding receipt. However, evictions in these neighborhoods increased by 35%, and non-white enrollment at SIG schools declined by 15%. Our findings illustrate a major limitation of place-based public good provision: sorting may displace the initially targeted population.

You exhaust me! Air pollution exposure near schools during pick-up and drop-off times.

Public and healthcare practitioner awareness of climate change and the longitudinal health impacts of air pollution is growing; however, it is not always clear how to implement practical and feasible steps that individuals and communities can take to help decrease air pollution and protect children, and it can be challenging to request and enforce behaviour changes that the public associates with perceived personal inconvenience. In this context, it is important to consider common, chronic exposures that increase children's risks, especially when straightforward solutions with minimal negative impact where significant evidence-based positive results are available. This article provides simple tips that healthcare providers, parents, and communities can use to advocate for decreased idling in school zones to improve air quality in and around schools.

The relationship between children’s fear of crime and pedestrian volume in school zones

ABSTRACT Focusing on reducing the fear of crime among elementary school students, this study examined the relationship between pedestrian volume and fear of crime in elementary school zones. For this, we i) identified why and where in the school zones students fear crime, by conducting a survey among fifth and sixth grade students of two elementary schools; ii) calculated the volume of pedestrian traffic across the school zones through local integration analysis of axial map, and iii) determined the relationship between fear of crime and pedestrian volume and the difference in patterns of fear of crime perceived by the students depending on the pedestrian volume. The results indicated a higher prevalence of fear of crime in places with low and high pedestrian volumes compared with those with an average volume. Notably, in high pedestrian traffic areas, despite improvement in natural surveillance, the major determinants of high fear of crime were human factors, such as strangers and peers who bully. The findings will help architects, building engineers, and urban planners effectively plan and design schools and public facilities in school zones. Moreover, it will enable policy makers develop effective and accurate guidelines regarding positioning patrol personnel or surveillance.

Driven by head or heart? Testing the effect of rational and emotional anti-speeding messages on self-reported speeding intentions

With speeding being a major factor in road traffic injuries and deaths, an important challenge lies in devising effective policy measures to influence drivers' speeding intentions. This paper investigates the effects of rational and emotional anti-speeding messages on self-reported speeding intentions of drivers who received a speeding ticket. Message design and evaluation built on protection motivation theory (PMT). In a randomized 3-group survey (N = 600), Group A (n = 200) received a standard administrative message; Group B (n = 200) received the standard message together with a rational-based anti-speeding message; Group C (n = 200) received the standard message together with an emotional-based anti-speeding message. Only Group B respondents reported lower intention to speed in general. Both rational- and emotional-based messages influenced respondents' reported intentions to reduce their speed in school zones and residential areas (30 km/h speed limits in both instances). The standard administrative message accompanying a speeding ticket was not associated either with respondents' reported general or area-related speeding intentions. PMT provided a valid theoretical basis for developing and evaluating evidence-based anti-speeding messages.

Performance Evaluation for Secure Communications in Mobile Internet of Vehicles With Joint Reactive Jamming and Eavesdropping Attacks

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is considered to be a backbone of smart transportation system where vehicles are expected to exchange traffic information and other data using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Furthermore, V2V communications is regarded as a medium to send upcoming traffic information to vehicles/drivers or passengers using wireless technology in a timely manner. This will help reduce traffic accidents, traffic jams, fuel consumption caused by traffic jams, loss of hours caused by delayed commuting and carbon emission caused by vehicles. Because of the critical nature of IoV for smart transportation systems, secure wireless communication is one of the critical and essential components to offer trustworthy services through IoV. Like in other wireless systems, wireless communication is open in air, which makes attackers’ job easy to launch the malicious actions in IoV. In this paper, we investigate the impact of mobility of vehicles for secure communications in IoV with joint jamming and eavesdropping attacks. We investigate different scenarios, when vehicles (legitimate ones and attackers) travel in same and opposite directions with low speed (school zone speed) limit to highway speed limit. Furthermore, we study the impact of association time and encryption time not only for establishing the connection between vehicles for V2V communications but also for exchanging messages for vehicles after successful association between vehicles and encryption of the message. In addition, we also study the joint impact of jamming and eavesdropping attacks in IoV for different speed limits, transmission ranges and wireless bandwidths. We investigate the extra cost in terms of transmit power and bandwidth incurred by jamming and eavesdropping attacks while maintaining the same secrecy rate as it could have been without those attacks. Numerical results are used to support the analysis.

Desafíos de la educación a distancia en la contingencia covid-19 una experiencia con docentes de educación primaria

This research reports the results of an interview applied to primary school teachers who are offering distance education in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, the information was sent by WhatsApp to 8 teachers. For the elaboration of the instrument, the aim was to define the objective: to know the challenges that the primary level teachers of the Francisco González Bocanegra Primary School, belonging to school zone 055, located in the Mochicahui Town Community, are facing. Municipality of the Fuerte, Sinaloa, once the suspension of face-to-face activities by distance activities was declared, a semi-structured interview of 11 questions was designed from the above, of which 6 are closed multiple-choice answers in which more could be selected of an alternative, as well as 5 open questions. For the preparation of the research, the responses of 8 respondents were considered, being 100% of the interviewed population. Data on sex and age are presented, how many male and female students do you have in your group; type of problems they are facing to transform your teaching activities; From his perspective, what kind of problems are your students facing to continue the distance classes; percentage of students who responded to distance activities; the type of technological resources used for distance learning activities; the technological resources that they are interested in learning to use for their distance learning activities; the type of institutional support they require to carry out classes to distance; Through which medium would they like to receive information, followed by the group serving and a proposal to the institution to support distance teaching during the contingency.

Effects of Digital-Based School Zone Signs on Inducing Speed Reduction

Effects of Digital-Based School Zone Signs on Inducing Speed Reduction

Book Review of “School Zone: A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization”

The subject of school violence remains an enduring subject of media coverage and discourse in the United States and a consistent source of conversation both public and private. That, of course, reflects the steady drumbeat of school shootings in this country that justifiably garner so much attention (and horror). Yet, as School Zone makes clear, those horrific incidents that symbolize the issue of school violence represent only a small component of that issue, and the many other aspects of school violence—and school-based crime more generally—are neither interrogated nor understood nearly enough outside the realm of academic sociology, criminology, and psychology. What the authors do with this book, therefore, is shine a light on the full scope of that issue to illuminate what does and does not go on in school, attempt to answer the important question of “why?”, and distill some important lessons from this information about what can be done in response. As such, this book is both timely and needed, and it serves an important role in translating sociological knowledge for broader use.