SCHOOL STREETS
CASE STUDY
After 5 years of parent campaigning, our School Street went live in September 2024 and is one of the most ambitious and extensive in London. From traffic modelling to school fairs, find out how we overcame council and community reservations to transform the school run.
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THE SCHOOL STREET
School streets restrict vehicle traffic around schools during the critical times when children are arriving & leaving.​ Situated around Rosendale primary school & Turney SEND school in Lambeth, this School Street is one of the most complex and ambitious in London. ​​
2km of road network around the school sites prioritised for walking and cycling.
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3 roads filtered by 4 ANPR cameras which prevent vehicle traffic from driving along all the access routes to the schools.
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800 cars per hour was the prior traffic count on Rosendale Rd, (the main school street road) that the children battled against every day.
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900 children across 2 schools are benefitting from a much safer environment on these routes and reduced pollution in their playgrounds.
A major active travel corridor has been created by the School Street which is also used by thousands of additional families travelling through the area to other nearby primary and secondary schools.
The programme demonstrates that an ambitious School Street can have wide benefits across the community it serves including:
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​The children at the local school
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Families travelling through to nearby schools
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Many residents in the area
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Commuters walking and cycling through
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Neighbouring roads which may have seen a reduction in congestion and are scheduled to have safer crossings.
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THE bACK STORY
​A school run on steroids: the Dulwich area is known for it's schools. This includes several non-catchment schools, where pupils are admitted from beyond the local neighbourhoods. High volumes of school run traffic into and out of the area mean a congested and dangerous school run.
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A complex site: Rosendale Primary School has two entrances on two separate roads. Putting a School Street on just one side would create issues on the other road, but a school street encompassing both sides would be a huge implementation. None of the roads were A or B road but they were very busy at peak times and incorrectly assumed by the council to be a bus route.
A SEND school: in the school street area there is both a primary school and a SEND school. Children attending the SEND school travel in from longer distances and many of those children have serious additional needs and are brought in by minibus, taxi or family car. It was difficult to see how a School Street could accommodate these transport requirements.
An emotionally charged environment
A traffic reduction scheme had been introduced in the neighbouring borough around a congested junction, so the school site was a boundary area to an adjacent scheme. There was an emotionally charged background to the subject of traffic in our area. It made a School Street very hard to broach as it was so polarising. There were concerns that anything that was done to the school roads would increase congestion and bus delays on the parallel stretch of Croxted Road, a huge part of the school community, where many families live.
THE OBJECTIONS
​Our first request to the council was in 2019 when School Streets were first being introduced. It was a time when no-one knew much about how they would work and implementation ambition was low. A complex situation like the one we had was ruled out by the council.
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​​Traffic volumes on Rosendale Road were too high which would make implementation of the School Street and the enforcement of it too difficult.
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If it was implemented it would displace traffic onto the adjacent parallel road, where high traffic volumes were already very upsetting for residents. ​
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The requirements of the SEND school meant that car access needed to be maintained through to this school site.
We needed to overcome issues around the technical implementation for the council traffic officers, as well as win over our local councillors and community who had reservations.
TOP TIP >
Find out if the council has considered your school site..
We submitted a freedom of information request to the council asking for all correspondence and documents relating to the site and proposed traffic schemes for the last 3 years. This allowed us to see their concerns in detail and to directly investigate and respond to these objections.
1. How did you start your campaign?
Our campaign started in 2019 simply by a parent call out in a school newsletter. Concerned about the air pollution and road danger around the school, this parent suggested the setting up of a clean air & safe routes Whatsapp group. Several other parents quickly joined. At the time, School Streets were just being considered by councils and so that became a natural goal for the group.
2. How did you grow support for a school street within the local community?
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The subject of traffic had become extremely divisive in our local area due to several neighbouring traffic schemes. We needed to find ways to get the local resident and parent community behind the School Street. So we began planning activities to highlight the issues and bring together people who felt that children should be prioritised.​​
3. How did you deal with the objection that there was "too much traffic" for a School Street?
The traffic volumes on Rosendale Road were 800 cars per hour between 8-9 am (equivalent to 7,000 cars per day). The majority of this was through-traffic, rather than traffic generated by the individual schools themselves. These traffic volumes meant that the council ruled out the area for a School Street both due to the difficulties involved in enforcing it and because of concerns around traffic displacement (see section 6.0).
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TOP TIP >
KEEP challenging the council
When our School Street was confirmed, the council told us that it was our constant challenge of "Why won't you prioritise these active journeys" that motivated them to find solutions.
4. How could the School Street timed closure be enforced with 800 cars per hour traffic volumes?
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At the time of our first request to the council in 2019, School Streets were being enforced by a mixture of parent volunteers and unmanned barriers. We knew that this would not be suitable for the volumes of traffic on Rosendale Rd and it was one of the reasons why the council were rejecting our School Street request.
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5. With traffic volumes that high, displacement of through-traffic onto neighbouring roads must have been a concern for all in the area? How did you tackle this?
The community around the school is very tight-knit. Families who wanted a School Street lived in every road in the area and although many desperately wanted a cleaner, safer environment around the school, we were all concerned about the impact of displacement. We needed to do some traffic modelling to better understand the possible impacts. This was a pivotal part of our campaign. Here we describe our techniques and key learnings.
[Read more]
TOP TIP >
YOUR LOCAL KNOWLEdGE IS VITAL
The results of our traffic modelling and analysis were counter-intuitive. Displacement was easy to assume when you looked at the area on the map. Local knowledge of the area, road layouts and traffic flows is essential to feed into these schemes.
6. What about pick up and drop off parking? How did locals in the roads around the school street feel about parents parking on their street?
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Residents in surrounding roads were concerned not just about through-traffic (see 7 above) but about parents driving to the school to pick up and drop off, parking on their roads and around the school street boundary.
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7. What measures were needed to accommodate SEND transport requirements?
The drop off and pick up area of Turney SEND school for those being collected by car was often congested, polluted and chaotic so a School Street would improve that environment for them. However, the children that attended the school predominantly came in school buses and taxis so there needed to be a system of exemptions in place to ensure that their vehicles could be prioritised through the school street cameras.
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[Read more]
TOP TIP >
FIND PRECEDENT FROM OTHER aREAS
Finding precedent from other boroughs or areas in the country for the type of implementation you are after gives councils confidence that they aren't reinventing the wheel. We hope this case study can set a precedent for other areas to follow.
8. How keen was the school to be a School Street?
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During the course of our campaigning (around 2022) Lambeth council announced that they would implement School Streets at 90% of their primary schools. It was clear to school staff that these programs were happening and that actually, since an average of 75% of primary pupils walk or cycle to school in London, if you didn't have a school street, your school might be at a disadvantage compared to other schools. The council are responsible for the safety of children on the roads outside schools and the burden should not be placed on school staff to support or be involved in this work. However, it was very helpful that the school staff had a very positive and engaged attitude towards active travel, due in part to the community organising and work we had done in getting our TFL gold star.
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9. How did you win over your local councillors?
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By now we had a powerful network of clued up people who could show the councillors the huge appetite for change.​ This helped changed the narrative, so a School Street was something demanded by parents, rather than being foisted on an area by the council.
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[Read more]
TOP TIP >
Visit your councillors at their surgeries
Many different parents from different roads around the school visited the councillors at their surgery to ask about the School Street.
This was important in showing the breadth of community support across the area.
10. What were your key campaign events?
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Lambeth council are at the forefront of School Streets, but this implementation was going to be one of the most ambitious and complex they’d yet delivered. Both officers and councillors needed to be convinced that their objections had been overcome. To do this we held lots of very positive events and campaign milestones.
Read more
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11. Did we live happily ever after?
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The roads are peaceful and safe in the morning while the children are arriving at school. A small number of cars travel through to access the SEND school and residential homes, but not the 800 per hour so many families had to contend with. There are cargo bikes coming from every direction. Parents congregate on the pavements for a chat after drop off, and at pick up the children mosey along, chatting to their friends without the deafening noise and threat of cars.​ The parallel stretch of road Croxted Road, which had previously been very congested has been reported to be either less so, or not worse, by some residents. We will be analysing the data to confirm that once the scheme has been in place for a full year. ​​
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However it's not perfect. There are cars driven by families accessing Rosendale school that cluster around the School Street's entrances. We hope these will reduce over time as active travel rates continue to improve. For those new intakes joining the school, they join with the School Street already in place, and so active travel rates increase because parents plan their journey with walking and cycling in mind, from the start of their school life.
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During the morning peak there are vehicles, often from outside the area, that don't see the signs until they are right at the School Street cameras. They then have to perform some U-turns around the School Street entrances which is frustrating for residents and creates road danger. We hope this can be further resolved through more signage and that also over time these will reduce.
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We also haven't stopped our campaigning. Whilst the School Street has created 2kms of safer and healthier access to the school, the main A road in the area, Croxted Rd, which many children have to cross to get to the School Street, has almost no safe crossing points. The School Street plan was announced alongside zebra crossing proposals for Croxted Rd and we continue to campaign to expedite their delivery.
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But beyond the safer & healthier school runs, perhaps the most unanticipated benefit of the last 5 years has been the community relationships that have been developed. During a large part of our campaign for a School Street, there was a level of division and anxiety in our area, due to high levels of traffic caused by network changes elsewhere. But many in the community was united in placing the school at the heart of their concern. Through working through these challenging issues together, many friendships have been made and our community feels stronger and more resilient because of it.
