Reduce car traffic around the school, fostering car-sharing and helping families to organise a shared car scheme to bring their children to school.
The ideas
Our school, Colegio Alauda, is placed in the heart of the mountains of Sierra Morena, in Cordoba, very close to the city centre. It is a modest school of approximately 300 students in a very closed and familiar atmosphere. When we learned about this project, we decided to look for a solution to the problems that we have to face everyday and that maybe, because of the stress in which we live absorbed, we are not really conscious about until we close our eyes and leave our minds to fly away…
8 am: traffic jam near the school. Our parents trying to park, driving backwards… Dangerous? Right! It might seem like something normal, something usual which might not cause any problem, but have we thought about the dangers of this custom? And even further, have we ever thought about solving this problem?
The initiatives
Road safety is just preventing accidents and minimizing their effect, especially on human lives and health. This is one of the main concepts of our project. Additionally, we are watching over the environment and trying to make people understand the terrible effects of pollution.
This project might seem to be a bit basic, but it is not. It consists of a study in which we have to find out which students live close to each other, in the same area. We have decided to organise them per postal codes. With this information we have created “teams” in which some parents drive their children and other pupils, who live close to them, to the school. The first step was organising and distributing the task between each of the four pupils who were in the same “team”. We took a survey of the parents in order to find out the impact and level of acceptance they might have. Furthermore, as social networks are very popular, we decided to open our account ‘Ride Green’ in Twitter (@ridegreen4), Instagram (@ride_green) and GooglePlus (ruedaenverde@gmail.com); we also created a web page (ruedaenverde.wix.com/renault) in which we are explaining our ideas, initiatives and aims of our project. As well, we hung some infographics in our school and consequently informed our mates about our innovative idea, Ride Green.
This idea is aimed at the parents and pupils of the Alauda School, as it improves mobility and helps pupils to become more responsible and independent. In addition, it tries to make people aware that we pollute a lot without noticing it and that we are going to destroy the world where we live. Finally, we want our youngest mates to collaborate with us, as they can promote comradeship and help others understand that getting in and out the school is not dangerous if we find a solution.
To sum up, in order to evaluate the project, after some months we will make a survey in order to find out its acceptance among the families of our school, and the future of this project, which could change the daily routine of a lot of people.
