Effectiveness of Traffic Calming Measures Near Schools Located in Residential Areas

‘Make the way to schools safe’ is a Polish nationwide scheme, which obliges road planners and administrators to implement traffic calming measures in existing streets in urban spaces. There is a variety of traffic calming measures (TCMs) that can be used in this application. Suburban locations are the primary focus due to generally longer distances children have to cover to reach their school. As part of the project described in this article we carried out a speed survey in a suburban district of Szczecin, a city located in north-western Poland to estimate the slowing effect of the implemented traffic calming measures. The analysis of the resulting speed profiles showed that speeds depended not only on the parameters of the applied TCMs but also on factors characterizing the urban space, such as street surroundings, parking conditions, and geometric parameters of the street.