Empowering Communities In Transformative Transport Decision-making: A Participatory Spatial Approach to Select Vulnerable Facilities for Citizen Sensing

This paper presents the first steps of the BEC2SCHOOL project, aimed at providing communities and policy-makers with methods and tools to enhance public participation in transport decision-making and foster the co-design of sustainable mobility solutions, taking advantage of smart technologies and data.

The methodology to select the most suitable facilities to be involved in the project is presented. In particular, it consists of the choice of the criteria to be selected based on different features, such as the presence of infrastructures for cycling and pedestrian mobility and users’ exposure to traffic externalities. These criteria are used for a spatial analysis aimed at identifying the priority of interventions and paving the way for the next steps of the project.

The main results show that traffic is considered the most important critical issue, and many schools show a medium-high level of vulnerability according to the selected criteria.

Results pave the way for further analyses that are needed to select the most suitable facilities where traffic and environmental sensors will be installed.

A bottom-up participatory approach will be set up, involving educational facilities and providing their users with tools to collect traffic and environmental-related data, analyze the relevant impacts and propose proper solutions to policy-makers in order to tackle the mobility challenges.