198 Safety perception and safety measures: joint forces to improve safety for youth around schools

Background Over 500 children and adolescents worldwide fall victim to traffic fatalities daily, making it the leading cause of death among those aged 5–29. This results in an annual societal cost of 69 million (iRAP, 2022). Most of these casualties occur among pedestrians, particularly those traveling to and from school, highlighting the vulnerability of this demographic due to inadequate road infrastructure. Ensuring safe streets for children extends beyond a fundamental right; it catalyzes access to education, promotes gender equality, and contributes to developing healthier, carbon-neutral communities (FIA Foundation, 2021). Recognizing the pivotal role of youth in shaping road safety decisions, it is putting youth at the center of street designs. This is the motion of a recently developed tool: the Youth Engagement App (YEA). The app serves as both a communication platform and an advocacy instrument, allowing students to pinpoint locations where they feel unsafe and supporting local governments to prioritize interventions. Therefore, understanding the built environment elements that impact road safety perception is key to creating friendly cities for children. Objective To do so, this study explores the association of qualitative feedback and road infrastructure assessments. Methods Involving 1,800 students using the YEA in three cities in Vietnam, over 18,000 feedback of the road infrastructure in the schools' surroundings. Results The perceptions were used as background information for identifying locations for road assessment with the support of the Star Rating for Schools (SR4S) tool. In total, 106 school zones have been assessed with the tools. Conclusions The combination of data collected will allow us to correlate the perception of safety information submitted as infrastructure-ranked pins in the YEA system with the results produced by road safety experts assessing infrastructure using the SR4S methodology. The similarities and differences will be discussed to understand the gaps among actual built environment parameters and how road users perceive them. The results of this study can be helpful to decision-makers and urban planners to provide infrastructure standards that incentivize people to walk and flag, which are the road elements that impact the most the perception of safety from youth on their way to school.