School Streets: guidance for local authorities - 5. Monitoring and evaluating School Streets

It is essential to monitor and evaluate School Street schemes to determine whether they are working as intended. Arrangements for monitoring and evaluation need to be considered at an early stage of scheme development to inform the collection of baseline data before introducing the scheme.

To provide clear evidence of the impact of the School Street scheme, care should be taken to minimise variations in the pre- and post-implementation monitoring regime by controlling as many variables as possible. This includes, for example, using the same data collection methods and collecting data at similar times of day and seasons of the year.

The objectives of the scheme determine what monitoring data should be collected.

Once an authority has analysed the monitoring data, it should share the key findings with stakeholders, local networks and the media.

For School Streets, monitoring is likely to focus on measuring changes to:

This data can be obtained through a simple mode of travel survey which a school may already collect. If not, a ‘hands up’ survey of pupils (and ideally staff too) can be carried out to ask about the usual mode of travel to school. If postcode data is obtained as well, it is possible to identify the degree to which pupils living within walking, wheeling or cycling distance are still being driven to school and also to include other geographically located data in evaluation.

Monitoring traffic on School Streets and surrounding streets is important for understanding the impact of any traffic or parking displacement, especially where residents have raised concerns about such impacts. Automatic traffic counters and/or video surveys are both useful methods of capturing this data.

The Local Air Quality Management process requires local authorities to regularly review and assess air quality in their areas. The time-limited and small-scale nature of School Streets schemes can make it difficult to identify the precise impact of a scheme on air quality but general trends can be discerned, particularly where data is collected over a period of time before and after introduction of a School Street.

Other sources of information to help evaluate the impact of a School Street (as well as to inform potential changes to the scheme) include:

• interviews and questionnaires with stakeholders, including pupils and teachers. These can provide insight into how a scheme has affected travel habits and parental perceptions of road safety as well as being used to find out whether people want the scheme to be made permanent.
• analysis of driver compliance with traffic restrictions and whether any patterns emerge from this data
• analysis of comments received on the scheme
• analysis of other data to assess wider impacts, such as childhood obesity, physical activity and mental health
• photographs: before and after pictures can be incredibly powerful in showing the impact of a School Street.