Safe School Routes, Kocaeli

Kocaeli Metropolitan Municipality asked us to look at what happens on the streets outside its schools in the half hour before the bell and the half hour after it, and to propose what might be done differently. We studied three sites around the gulf — a primary school in Başiskele, two schools sharing a street in Derince, and a cluster of four schools in İzmit — and delivered the analysis and the designs as a book in the spring of 2024. Between them the three sites serve some 3,900 students, and a kindergarten besides.

WHAT THE STREETS ARE LIKE NOW

Over three days in April 2024 we surveyed a hundred people at each site and spent the arrival and dismissal hours counting, measuring and mapping — who walks where, how fast the cars move, where people stand and wait, which routes they wear into the ground.

The same answer came back at all three. Most people did not feel safe: three in four at Seymen and İbni Sina, three in five at Yahya Kaptan. Asked why, they named the traffic at the gates. Cars turning into the street at pick-up time, drivers coming the wrong way, double parking, arguments between people who are all in a hurry. One parent told us plainly that her child had been hit by a car.

Children make up a large share of the people on these streets at those hours, and many of them are on their own. At Seymen, 48% of the pedestrians during the school run are children between five and twelve, and one in five walks without an adult. At İbni Sina the share is 37%, and two in five of those children walk alone. At Yahya Kaptan, where a high school sits on the same block, more than half the people on the street are teenagers, and 54% of the younger children walk unaccompanied.

Two findings framed the rest of the work.

The first is that people are driving distances they could walk. At Seymen, 95% of those we surveyed live in the neighbourhood — and 86% still arrive by car. Twelve per cent walk. In the busiest hour we counted 138 people and 105 vehicles on that street, with a top speed of 51 km/h.

The second is that people walk wherever the walking is safest, and they will take the road if the pavement fails them. On İrem Sokak in Derince the footway is 80 centimetres wide, and 80% of pedestrians walk in the carriageway instead. At Yahya Kaptan the municipality had already marked out a protected walking lane with plastic delineators, and 98% of pedestrians chose it over the road. Two per cent used the carriageway. That is the whole argument in one number.

HOW WE WORKED

Three principles ran through all three sites: pedestrian safety, public space, and nature-based solutions.

A walkable neighbourhood is often described as everything within a twenty-minute walk of home, because research suggests that is about as far as most people willingly go on foot. For small children and the people caring for them the circle is smaller still — sleeping and feeding keep them close to home. Being able to walk easily from the front door to a nursery, a playground, a health centre or a shop is as good a measure of a neighbourhood as any.

The tools we used are ordinary and well tested. We drew on the Global Designing Cities Initiative's Designing Streets for Kids, on school street trials Superpool has run in Maltepe, Istanbul, and on the municipality's own trial in Körfez. Widen the pavement and narrow the lane. Tighten the corner radius so a driver has to slow down to turn. Add pinch points and chicanes. Raise the crossing to the level of the footway. Put the crossing where people already cross. And where the traffic does not need to be there at all, take it out.

Across the three sites, the ground given over to people on foot goes from 3,350 m² to 10,900 m².

SEYMEN İLKOKULU, BAŞİSKELE

657 students, a primary school and a children's park on a street that fills with parked cars twice a day. We turned the block in front of the school into two plazas — one at the gate, one at the park — and redesigned Hatmi Çiçeği Sokak and Preveze Caddesi around them, changing the direction of traffic to reclaim the space it was using. Pedestrian space rises from 550 m² to 2,700 m², close to five times what is there now.

İBNİ SİNA İLKOKULU, DERİNCE

A primary school of 568 students and a middle school of 459 share this street, with a children's park in front of the middle school. Almost everyone here already walks — 96% of those we surveyed arrived on foot — and almost nobody feels safe doing it. İrem Sokak carries only six vehicles an hour, and gives them 5.5 metres of the road while leaving 80 centimetres for people. We proposed reversing that arithmetic: 3 metres for vehicles, and 1.1 and 2.1 metres of footway on either side, on a pedestrian-priority surface with permeable paving where cars park. Pedestrian space rises from 950 m² to 2,700 m².

YAHYA KAPTAN ORTAOKULU, İZMİT

The largest of the three: a kindergarten, a primary school, a middle school and a high school, together with the Süleyman Demirel Cultural Centre and the Arasta Park shopping centre. 756 people and 261 vehicles pass through in an average hour. Only 37% of the people we surveyed arrive by car; the rest walk or take the tram. This is already a place people move through on foot, and the proposal is mostly a matter of giving that movement its own ground — a redesigned junction, a calmed Çiçekli Sokak, and two plazas between the schools and the cultural centre. Pedestrian space rises from 1,850 m² to 5,500 m².

MATERIALS AND PLANTING

The book closes with a palette, so that whoever builds this has something to build from: asphalt for the carriageway, split granite setts for the junctions and the raised school-gate surfaces, thermoplastic paint for the markings, brushed in-situ concrete for the footways, natural stone blocks for the plaza seating, basalt setts around the planting. Permeable paving where cars stand, so the water goes down rather than along.

The planting list is short and local — silver lime, black pine, ornamental plum, magnolia, blue spruce, mophead acacia for the trees; lavender, Russian sage, pampas, stipa, privet and climbing hydrangea underneath. Enough shade to make waiting bearable in June.

Very little of this is expensive, and none of it is novel. What it asks for is a decision about who the street is for during the two hours of the day when it is busiest with children. Kocaeli's mayor is quoted at the front of the book saying that the people of this city deserve the best of everything. On the evidence of April, what they would settle for is somewhere to stand that is not the road.