Istanbul Safe School Zones

Istanbul has 917,538 primary school students in 990 schools. Police records from 2019 counted 1,479 collisions across the city, a quarter of them involving pedestrians. Almost all of these children walk: across the schools surveyed, 94% of caregivers said walking was how their child got to school, and 81% were less than fifteen minutes from the gate. Only a small fraction said they felt safe doing it.

The Pedestrian Accessibility unit of the Municipality's Transportation Department has been developing a Safe School Zones policy that defines a 500-metre zone around every primary school — pedestrian entrances moved onto side streets, vehicle speeds brought down to 20 km/h, heavy vehicles kept out. This document was prepared to support the policy's adoption with evidence from the street, and to give the city a guideline for building the zones once adopted.

Forty-three schools were selected from the 990: those with more than 1,000 students, cross-referenced against the 2021 Pedestrian Access Master Plan and against pedestrian collision data within a 500-metre radius. Fieldwork ran across thirteen districts in October and November 2024. Sidewalk widths, travel lane widths, crossing dimensions, gradients and surfaces were measured at each entrance; pedestrians, vehicles, trucks and bicycles were counted in twenty-minute windows around entry and exit times; operating speeds were recorded; and 1,844 parents were interviewed at the gate. Every entrance was then rated using the Star Rating for Schools tool developed by the International Road Assessment Programme.

The average rating across the 43 schools was 3.0 stars, with 46% of locations below 3.0. Forty-four per cent of school streets have sidewalks narrower than 1.8 metres. Fifty-three per cent have no marked crossing at the entrance. Fifty-eight per cent carry parked cars on both sides. One school in the whole set had a crossing supervisor, and one had pedestrian channelisation. The two variables with the strongest effect on the rating were the posted speed limit and the operating speed of vehicles — one-way streets with no parking produced the safest conditions in the sample.

Four design strategies follow from this: raised crossings at least six metres long at every entrance, conversion of two-way school streets to one-way, travel lanes reduced to 3.3 metres with the reclaimed width given to the school-side sidewalk, and chicanes on streets wider than eight metres. Modelled through the assessment tool, the seven lowest-rated entrances rise from between 1.0 and 3.1 stars to between 4.1 and 5.6 — mostly by removing parking, marking a crossing, opening sight lines and dropping the limit from 50 to 20 km/h. A crossing supervisor adds a further 0.3. Implementation begins in 2025 and runs through 2027, against the city's target of zero road deaths by 2050.

The document was prepared by Superpool with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Transportation Department as part of the Partnership for Healthy Cities — a network of 74 cities supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies in partnership with the World Health Organization and Vital Strategies — under its Policy Accelerator programme.