This article is more than 9 years old The app that gives Oslo’s children a direct say over their own road safety
A new Oslo-based app has taken that idea further and is giving power directly to the people who, when it comes to urban planning, are too-often left out of the conversation: children.
Two years ago, Vibeke Rørholt, who has worked in traffic safety in Norway for more than15 years, began compiling a report that looked into road safety for children in Oslo. Commissioned to work for Norway’s Agency of the Urban Environment, Rørholt had to come up with a way to encourage the capital’s 44,000 children to walk or cycle to school. What better way to find out how they feel about their own security than by asking them directly?
With €347,000 (£290,000) in funding from the city, the Research Council of Norway and consultancy Capgemini, Rørholt needed to find ways to create an environment where parents would feel that it was safe enough for children to walk to school. “I was supposed to make a traffic report on all roads in Oslo. That’s a big job,” she comments. “So I thought, why don’t we ask the children how they feel on the street?” The best way to do that, she says, was to turn to gamification. Using a smartphone app, with the idea of users being “secret agents” for the city, children can send immediate reports on their route to school when they come across, for example, a difficult crossing on the street or an area of heavy traffic. Their location is tracked using GPS, so researchers can pinpoint exactly where these hazards are.
The idea of crowdsourcing information to understand what needs to be improved in cities is nothing new. In Jakarta, Indonesia, the city started exploring how citizens could help address major issues including flooding and congestion. The Emergency Management Agency set up a project called PetaJakarta to create a real-time, crowdsourced map of flooding in the city. In San Jose, California, city authorities have set up what they describe as a “real-time civic engagement tool” whereby residents download a free app, and can send, for example, a photograph of litter connected to GPS that goes directly to city hall.
Rørholt says that using information provided by children through the app, authorities have rebuilt several big crossings and made more pavements to make it safer for pedestrians in the past year. For example, several students reported that they liked to walk through privately-owned land on part of their journey to school as it felt safer, so Oslo municipality agreed with the owner of the property that if the government created a crossing, path and handrail, he would maintain it.
