ThankYou
By: San Ignacio School - 10° Grade
Ride Our World
Our school is located in the city of Medellin, an industrial center in Colombia, which by its rapid population growth in recent decades has seen an uncontrolled increase of its vehicle fleet without an adequate development of road infrastructure. Furthermore, since the city is situated in a valley where there is little wind circulation, toxic gases from industry and motor vehicles are accumulated in the air, threatening the health of the population (Medellin is ranked 15th among most polluted Latin American cities). The desire to help solve these problems motivated us to participate in "Your ideas, your Initiatives"
In the first stage, the 17 students accepting the call were distributed in seven teams to investigate some aspect of mobility in the city. Two teams analyzed traffic congestion in the school area and in the neighborhood where most students dwell. They found that the number of vehicles traveling at peak times exceeded the capacity of the roads. Other two teams focused on the the lack of road safety education and found that both drivers and pedestrians are often unaware of traffic rules or, if they know norms, do not keep them because they see that others break them too, which creates accident risks and traffic jam; the last two teams reviewed the newest trends in car design and found that although car creators seek to reduce environmental impact and improve mobility (with e. g. self-driving cars), the mass marketing of electric or driverless cars is not at the moment in the interests of entrepreneurs or local customers.
After this first exploratory stage, all the 17 students gathered to put together what we had found and set priorities for taking action. We knew from school we could not make the whole city change, but we could improve awareness and habits of our school community regarding the use of the vehicle. We conclude that the main problem is that we use too often the private car and do not take advantage of other means, such as cycling, public transport or car sharing to transport us to school, so we had to do something in order to let our colleagues become aware of this reality .
To validate our conclusion, we decided to conduct a survey at school to find out if our partners were willing to ride bicycles or share their cars, and what difficulties were to do that. We surveyed 113 students between 8 and 18 years old. This survey revealed that 51.3% are willing to come to school by bicycle, because this contributes to improve the environment and traffic of the city. 48.7% is not willing because they live too far away, do not feel safe on the roads or do not find a place to park their bikes at school. This made us notice that the school bicycle parking is insufficient (it has only four seats) and we should change it. The survey also asked our colleagues if they were willing to share the car with other students, even if they were not family members or friends. The answer was unexpected: 82.3% said they would.
