Integrating Active Travel and Public Space to Create Spaces that Work for Young People: PUBLIC REALM & URBAN SPACES Smart Class 2025 Retrospective

At PUBLIC REALM & URBAN SPACES Smart Class 2025, Walk Wheel Cycle Trust showcased a selection of School Streets and neighbourhood approaches projects that have involved deep community engagement along with child led design through various methods, delivering public space transformation and active travel improvements.

In their joint presentation and co-hosted roundtable sessions, Lorenzo Ciancarini (Senior Engineer) and Zeina Hawa (Principal Engineer) touched on the role of widening the scope of highways improvement projects to encompass wider public health benefits, and on the role of meaningful, broad engagement and data collection in shaping design proposals and creating lasting street transformations.

Presentation highlights and notes:

• Walk Wheel Cycle Trust, formerly Sustrans – Same charity, same people, same goals; Just a different name and branding;
• Streets today – Streets make up more than 80% of the public space in our cities and are an incredible resource; What are the demands on this space?
• There’s a lot of competition for space in our streets: Moving – Private cars, Buses, Commercial vehicles, Cycle users, Pedestrians, Waste collection, Emergency vehicles; Static – Spaces for business deliveries, Bus stops, Parking bays, Street furniture (benches, postboxes, signage, lighting), Utilities (above and below ground), Cycle parking;

• Thinking holistically…
• Children’s Walking and Cycling Index 2024 (23 cities surveyed) – This Sustrans UK Report makes it clear that more people want to see active travel improvements and more people want to see improvements in street environments e.g. 15% of people want to drive more, 50% of people want to walk and wheel more, 43% of people want to cycle more;
• What percentage of residents think that these changes would help them walk or wheel more? 72% Wider pavements; 72% More frequent road crossings, with reduced wait times; 78% Nicer places along streets to stop and rest, like more benches, trees and shelters; 74% Better pavement accessibility, like level surfaces, dropped kerbs at crossing points; 68% Fewer cars parked on the pavement; 71% Less feat of crime or antisocial behaviour in their area;
• Benefits to economy, health and connectivity – Living Streets ‘The Pedestrian Pound. 3rd Edition’ (2024) reveals that: 95% of London business improvement districts (BIDs) agreed that a safe, attractive walking environment is good for business; 41% of disabled pedestrians consider the UK’s streets to be inaccessible; 41% of people reported increased well-being after using a parklet in London; 44% of people in Scotland walk to local shops daily or several times a week; the introduction of default 20mph speed limits in Wales is estimated to have saved the Welsh NHS just over £92m in the first year alone – nearly three times higher than the implementation costs;
• So there’s lots of demand on nice spaces; lots of evidence around nice spaces improving health and wellbeing; and lots of evidence around needing more accessible, safe, streets that unlock opportunities;
• Children and Urban Design…
• Children’s exclusion from design, and from having a say in the environments they grow up in; School streets as a space to tackle issues around exclusion; School streets as a place to challenge the traditional definition of a street;
• We focus on children in urban design because they are among the most vulnerable road users, yet their needs reveal what makes places safe, inclusive, and liveable for everyone; Engagement is vital because children’s perspectives – often overlooked – bring creativity, authenticity, and lived experience that shape healthier, more human-centred environments; The quality of public space in urban and
  suburban spaces is crucial for the physical, social and cognitive development of young children and as opportunities of outside play;
• School streets are a good entry point to focus on these conversations, thinking about wellbeing, health, social interaction and what we want from our most valuable public space, the street; Children are less independent and more exposed to traffic dangers. Designing for them ensures safer streets, crossings, and play areas, which benefit all residents; When children and their families are part of the design process, they feel invested – This builds long-term support for active travel and public space improvements;

• School Streets…
• School streets is an all-encompassing term – Traditionally tackle congestion and improve air quality at the school gates, particularly at drop off and pick up times, making it easier and safer to walk and cycle to school; London boroughs have delivered hundreds of them over the years, though the original concept started in Italy;
• Most of the focus of school streets has been on temporary timed closures – Limited to timed closures during pick up and drop off hours usually through signs, cameras or gates; Tackles idling, congestion & air pollution (temporarily); However, does not provide additional benefits beyond timed closures (air pollution, street environment etc); Low place making value;
• However, there’s a lot more opportunity for wider and more permanent street transformations around schools – Wherever possible, look for opportunities to create permanent closures and the potential to truly transform streets; Road space reallocation, creating a sense of place, flipping the priority of streets to put children first, improving safety and accessibility; Changing children’s relationship with their urban environment, residents and parents too; Long term mode shift change to active travel is also part of the aims; Can be complementary to a timed closure;
• Why School Streets? 1) Traffic and its associated road danger has gradually narrowed the ‘home range’ of children, reducing their right
  to roam and play 2) 1 in 4 cars during the morning peak are linked to the school run 3) While road danger is the most common reason cited by parents for not allowing their children to walk or cycle to school;
• Wide Engagement & Raising Ambition: Hounslow School Streets – A recent example of exemplar school street projects that WWCT worked on with the London Borough of Hounslow; Took a long time to convince them of the value of extensive co-design as well as
  pushing the ambition with the school streets, but got there eventually; Extensive engagement with students and wider school community over multiple stages; Allowed WWCT to garner buy in from wider groups, including residents, and respond to specific issues;
• Car Free Day Play Street – One really positive way of helping people reimagine the street was car free day; 300% increase in people walking and cycling on the school street that day – via street cameras;
• Extensive collaborative design – Pupil’s workshops; Pop ups, design sessions; Whole School Collaborative Design; Collaborative design, surveys; Teachers’ Codesign session; Local Community Centre Pop-up; “Allowed us to go into details of specific locations and zones in the school street area”;
• Co-design Preferences Outputs – Widening Footway, Informal seating & play space, Streetside seating, Rain gardens, Raised tree bed with seating, Raised planter with seating edge; Based on people’s preferences in the discovery stage for what they’d like to see in
  different zones as well as the emerging themes, “we used these to develop early sketch designs for each school. Went back to the school community in a test phase. Testing specific design suggestions and themes in different parts of the street. Combined all of this together. Outputs by type of stakeholder. Allowed us to pick up on differences. Examples around tensions of including seating and waiting areas between residents and parents. Tensions around parking removal, which we addressed through a parking survey”;

• Parking Surveys – Bring data into engagement conversations; Address concerns; Create space for bolder ambition;
• Engagement Tools – Also developed 3D sketches which helped people reimagine the spaces better; People need different ways of understanding and looking at spaces – not everyone good with a 2D plan;
• School streets as road space reallocation projects – Differences huge; Moving from quite a car dominated street environment – even if no heavy traffic, to a space that completely challenges the traditional hierarchy and functionality of a street; Street as an extension of the school, public space; Talk about how some of the design elements came from the engagement; Going back to the point of road space reallocation; School streets as an opportunity to reimagine streets completely, and practice child led design a bit more meaningfully;
• Minecraft as a street design and engagement tool with students and local authority engineers – To place children at the heart of school street design, WWCT (Sustrans) has been championing creative engagement with young people, and one of the tools they have been using for several years is Minecraft, a 3D sandbox game that allows you to build infinite worlds; An example working with Westminster Council on 5 school streets, delivering 1) Healthy Streets Audits 2) Minecraft focused design workshops 3) Early concept designs focused on student’s ideas – “Most of these school streets already had timed closures, our focus was on child-led design, expanding scope from timed closures to design more ambitious school streets, permanent street transformations, and ensure children’s ideas were brought to life”;
• What design features help to make a street healthy? Seating, Playgrounds, Cafes, Tables, Gardens, Museums, Zebra Crossings, Pavilion etc;
• Healthy streets audits conducted around the streets in each school to help highlight issues and low scoring areas – ideally this would be done with students as well; These were discussed with the students along with “a brainstorm of what we could improve in the weaker areas before going into Minecraft. Giving children tools and critical discussion around the street an improvements before they jump into design”;
• Children intuitively use this video game to re-imagine their environment – a co-learning process takes place through which engineers and designers learn how to use the tool from the children;
• Engagement to Design – Highlighting key design themes and features that came up in the students’ designs during the Minecraft workshop and the prioritisation exercise: Safer crossings, Shade and shelter, Places to rest, Quiet and calm, Active travel, Safety, Relaxing spaces, Clean air;

• Street Trials – Challenging street environments for school street delivery…
• What happens in situations where timed closures are not a possibility?
• Several years ago, worked with Lambeth council to transform New Park Road outside Richard Atkins school from a car-dominated and parking-dominated street into a much safer and more pleasant environment; This was a good example of the importance of permanent transformations – what they mean to young people – involvement of young people in shaping their streets; Lambeth asked Sustrans Speed calming to deter driving & Placemaking; Stakeholder group ran pop ups and organised collaborative design workshops; Ownership by coming up with solutions; Informed us about this issues and recognised something had to be done to create a pleasant environment; suggested the need for a zebra crossing (not the vision) to pull creativity from the local people; Using elements of shared space that blur the boundaries; Buildouts to narrow the carriageways and accommodate crossing – also to deter vehicles; Decorated with colour; Circles increase in frequency to highlight informal crossings; Cars approach with caution and low speeds (new environment that is tight and difficult to drive through); Trees placed in the middle of the street bring greening back to the street;
• After a long stakeholder engagement process, multiple concept designs, and securing additional funding to deliver a more ambitious scheme, Sustrans organised a live trial using the street kit; This really highlighted the value of trials in engagement both for young people but also for community; People were shocked that children were using the carriageway space;
• It was a huge success – Cars slowed down and there were generally positive interactions with drivers; There was 100% compliance to the 20mph limit (10mph average); Cyclists took primary position and were given priority by car driver, and everyone gave priority to people wanting to cross; Children felt safe to ride their bike – Looks impossible to drive through and very unconventional, so vehicles are cautious and give priority to people as it doesn’t feel like a car dominated space; Wider benefits beyond school street, drop in speeds and volumes by 30% cannot be achieved by just a timed closure; 4 collisions before, Zero collisions after scheme implementation;
• School Streets – Engagement with Fleet Primary School, Devonshire House Preparatory School and Torriano Primary School: Gathering and visualising data and preferences from the school community around the school streets improvements; Seating/perching became a topic of discussion, somewhere to wait and pick up, have a conversation with other parents, teachers, while providing space for children to play; Extending the footway, new planting, and responding to the architecture/context of the area;
• St Joseph’s, Islington (Highgate Hill – 10% incline) – There was carriageway reallocation, removed parking, difference of half a metre between carriageway and footway; First tram trolleys in Europe went along so WWCT tried to replicate the axels in the designs; Greening, seating, continuous footway, planters at different heights;
• Robert Blair School, Islington – Widened footways with greening flush, continuous footways, specifying hardscapes, Dutch entry kerb for vehicles (one of the first locations in London), slower vehicle entries; Creating continuity in the walking space – Removed guard railing, reduced carriageway width, tree planting and greening, cycle infrastructure;

• Child-focused neighbourhood approaches – Southwark pocket parks and filters; Using temporary activations for further engagement and improving filters; Started off from a project called child friendly Newington in Southwark, South London; public health positioned project around childhood obesity; Engagement with young people around their journeys to school, which identified a number of locations/routes to address that were important to the kids; This dovetailed well with Southwark’s plans for low traffic neighbourhoods as trials throughout covid; There was a chance to develop these trials into something bigger; Some of them started as a simple trial with planters – one set, wanted to expand to two sets;
• Extended pocket parks – Extension of existing simple filter from one line of planters to full pocket park with space in between; Synergies between the child friendly Newington project locations and Walworth LTNs; One filter is a traffic management tool and two sets of filters become a public space; Allowance for a lot more transformation within that space; Lots of workshops took place with young people which ended up feeding into permanent concept designs for improvements to streets; Concept designs from child friendly Newington project upgrading LTN: Wayfinding markings, climbable structure into park, Green spaces with playable features, Seating and a central square, a tighter junction with a raised table, and safe crossing to delineate a common route used by children to surrounding schools;
• Temporary activations – Southwark had already delivered some of these as very simple filters with just a planter under emergency measures during the pandemic; But to deliver them in the interim, trial measures were proposed; Temporary activations were also used as part of ways to talk to passers by and engage with residents about proposed changes; Outputs and themes from the workshops with the students were brough into the trials – seating, greening, colour and art;
• Child Friendly Newington – Pop up days, play days, engaging lots of people as part of this;
• Beyond consultation – Representativeness & limits of consultations: Capturing the neutral & seldom heard voices…
• Example from Walworth street activation – Difference in demographics and representation in orange and blue; Pop ups vs online;
• Recognising the difference between online and in person engagement – Emphasis on pop ups; A much more diverse and representative group of people get to give their opinion; Capturing the neutral middle;
• Representativeness/limits of consultations: Respondents are a very small fraction of residents; Large silent majority – Usually people happy or indifferent will not go out of their way to comment;
• How can we engage with seldom heard voices? Must get buy-in for long-term change; In person, pop ups, localised, Online tools, Letter drops/FAQs, Site banners/boards;
• Temporary to permanent transformation – Southwark pocket parks and filters with play elements: After construction/Permanent scheme;

• Wider Interventions – Widening the scope we can look at whole at area wider approaches like LTNs…
• In Lambeth, 5 LTNS introduced as trials – Ferndale, Oval, Railton, Streatham Hill and Tulse Hill; 5-8 filters per LTN; Total of 33 street designs; Huge change by flipping priority of streets;
• Area wide strategy with multiple pocket parks – e.g. Introduction of a bus gate, Traffic calming, Shorter crossing distance, Rain garden (SuDS), Increased biodiversity, Part of wider strategy for the neighbourhood;
• Atlantic Road Trial and Visualisation – Phasing shows flexibility…
• Extended Filters – Constructed pocket parks with extended filter at Fentiman Road, Lambeth, taking advantage of no active frontages;
• Diagonal Filter – Diagonal filter with SuDS and increased public space and seating; Shift of priority to pedestrians and cycles;
• Bus gate – Chicaned extended bus gate with elevated carriageway, SuDS and seating;
• Local Street Upgrades within healthy neighbourhoods at Elm Park Parade – Changing nature of space; Improvements wider than just traffic filters; Loading; Bins; Seating; Temp and permanent for different uses/businesses; SuDs;
• Dulwich Village Option 2 Public Realm – Elevated filter; High ambition project; Creation of a large new public square from a single filter; Big open space;
• Paris School Streets – Ambitious programme of school streets with 300+ school streets delivered, and about 70+ with significant greening; Create more than 700 acres of green space by 2030; Replace 60,000 parking spaces with trees by the end of the decade;
• Superblocks, Barcelona City-wide strategy – Prioritising people over cars, with focus on accessibility; Community participation; Superblocks 400x400m (smaller than a neighbourhood, bigger than a block). Aims: Community and social cohesion; Improve biodiversity; Sustainable mobility. Temp to perm transformation also with lots of new greening in the street – road space reallocation;
• Key recommendations for taking a more holistic approach to improving our streets…
• Project focus – Placing children at the heart of the conversation; School streets as an entry point into conversations around road space reallocation;
• Engagement – Focusing on wellbeing and health as topics that resonate with a wider range of people; Deeper and broader engagement;
• Design approach – Looking for permanent transformations and road closures where possible; Developing a network of school streets; Starting from the first principles of street use; Possibility of improvements in any environment;
• Further information (each accessible via on slides) – ‘An Introductory Guide to Low Traffic Neighbourhood Design’; Walk Wheel Cycle Trust Further Design Examples/’Design Portfolio & Case Studies London 2025′; Recent Guide (Sept 2025) to ‘Designing Green and Blue Infrastructure for Active Travel Networks’;
• Additional Reading – ‘Movement – how to take back our streets and transform our lives’; ‘Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life’; ‘The Pedestrian Pound 3rd Edition’; ‘Walking and Cycling Index 2023’.

If you meet our regular delegate qualification criteria but were unable to join us The Wellington Hotel, Westminster, for the live in-person event on December 4th, CLICK HERE and complete the short “Download form” (located at the bottom of the post) to receive a unique link enabling free access to the presentation video recordings and slides (including the film footage and slides from Lorenzo and Zeina’s initial presentation).

Those qualifying to receive the rich presentation content from this event include commissioning, procurement, trialling, partnering and policy leads, senior influencers, strategic decision makers, planners, place makers, architects, green space managers, urban designers, communities & neighbourhoods, highways & street scene, transport & mobility and high streets & regeneration professionals from councils and local authorities (city, borough, metropolitan, district, county and combined); people and place partnerships; developers, landowners and creators of privately owned public spaces; prime contractors and city centre management companies; DfT, DEFRA, MHCLG, EA and supporting governmental bodies; transport authorities, highways agencies and public transport operators; civic organisations and community groups; and other key players from the public realm ecosystem with responsibility for managing, maintaining and operating our streets, squares, forecourts, parks, pathways, retail centres, car parks, airports, ports, travel hubs, hospitals, housing estates, campuses, communal gardens and the assets contained within these public or semi-public spaces.