From the Bus Stop to the School Door, Every Part of the Journey Matters

By Anderson Abernathy, President & COO of Michelin Mobility Intelligence

Parents know the feeling. You are dropping a child off at school, walking to the entrance or waiting for a school bus, and something about the road doesn’t feel right. Cars seem to approach too quickly. A driver brakes suddenly. Vehicles turning are crossing paths with pedestrians. There is a lot happening in a very small space.

You may not have data to describe it. But you notice it.

When looking at making school routes safer, we naturally focus on the journey children make to and from school and after school activities. But that journey doesn’t begin and end with the school bus. It includes the roads children cross near schools, the intersections they navigate and all the interactions happening around school. Add in several bus stops, a busy gas station and fast food restaurants in the mix – there is a lot going on.

For transportation leaders responsible for hundreds of schools across a city or region, that creates a difficult question: How do you know where to focus first?

That is one of the questions I explored this summer during the panel “From Pixels to Pavement – Using Technology to Protect People Walking and Rolling” at the Governors Highway Safety Association Annual Meeting. And I believe it points to something bigger about how we think about road safety.

Roads are about movement, not just infrastructure.

At Michelin Mobility Intelligence, we have the benefit of being part of a company that has spent well over a century close to the road. That gives us a particular perspective.

We don’t think about transportation simply as technology. We can think about movement. Journeys. Road users. Communities. Human behavior. Most importantly, we can think about what happens when all of those things meet on the road and influence a safe journey for all.

A school zone is a perfect example. At different moments of the day, children are walking and biking, buses are arriving and departing, parents are dropping off students, commuters are traveling through, and people are navigating nearby businesses and transit stops.

The road is not simply pavement connecting two points. It is a place where people’s journeys intersect throughout a day.

Understanding those interactions can give transportation leaders another layer of evidence when deciding where to focus their attention and resources.

Sometimes what we expect to find isn’t what the evidence shows

Sometimes what we expect to find isn’t what the evidence shows. For my GHSA presentation, the Michelin Mobility Intelligence team explored mobility conditions around Las Estrellas Dual Language Elementary School in Minneapolis.

As a disclaimer, this was an illustrative analysis conducted in preparation for the conference, not a project for the school or the city, and it was not intended to recommend a particular intervention. The school offered a useful setting for the discussion because it serves more than 400 students and has been included in a Safe Routes to School initiative supporting bicycling opportunities.

Going into an analysis like this, we thought speeding would be the main risk factor, but it wasn’t. Our analysis did not identify a systemic speeding problem at the intersection examined. Instead, we observed repeated patterns of braking, acceleration and other driver reactions.

That is an important distinction – and where context matters.

A parent standing on the sidewalk may simply experience an intersection as busy, unpredictable or worthy of attention. Behavioral evidence can help transportation professionals investigate what may be contributing to those conditions.

In this case, multiple roads converge near the school, with transit stops, businesses and other activity culminating in many interactions among different road users. When taking into account this context, like land use, points of interest, apartments, nursing homes, churches, gas stations and fast-food restaurants on this major arterial, it all leads to risk. In this case, risk isn’t influenced by one factor – there could be many – and that’s why context is important.

The lesson for us was simple: don’t assume you know what the risk is.

Now imagine looking across hundreds of schools

Transportation agencies aren’t responsible for a single intersection. They may be responsible for hundreds of school zones, thousands of intersections and an enormous variety of journeys happening every day. Every location is different.

During our analysis of the intersections near the school, we found noticeably different patterns of driver behavior at locations less than a mile apart. The takeaway wasn’t that one intersection was “good” and another “bad.” It was that road-user behavior can vary significantly even across a relatively small area.

Now scale that thinking across a network of schools. Questions become:

Where are drivers repeatedly reacting?
Where do complex movements converge?
Where might the combination of vehicles, buses, pedestrians and cyclists warrant a closer look?
And where can further investigation help transportation leaders determine how to focus limited resources?

Instead of waiting for a single metric to tell the entire story, transportation professionals can bring together crash history, road design, community experience and observed mobility patterns to build a fuller picture of what is happening.

For communities pursuing Vision Zero and other transportation safety strategies, that additional visibility can support an essential task: prioritization.

Start with the question – not the technology

One of the messages I shared at GHSA was that big data doesn’t have to be intimidating.

Transportation professionals do not need to become data scientists. They need credible information that helps answer the questions already on their desks:

Where should we look more closely?
What road-user behaviors deserve attention?
How can we prioritize limited resources?
After an intervention, how can we understand whether conditions have changed?

The work can start small: validate a concern, conduct a targeted assessment and use evidence to help engineering, enforcement, education and other partners build a shared understanding of conditions.

Michelin has spent generations understanding the relationship between people, vehicles and roads. Today, we can extend that mobility expertise by helping transportation leaders understand how road users are actually moving through communities and where patterns may warrant a closer look.

This concept is worth remembering: every point on a map represents a real place where someone’s journey is happening. And when that journey belongs to a child, understanding what is happening on the road around them matters.

How Michelin Safer Roads supports agencies

Michelin Mobility Intelligence helps transportation agencies and city leadership use data to understand and reduce vulnerable road user exposure across their networks.

Want to see where risk is hiding on your network? Book a demo to find out how Michelin Safer Roads can help.

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