Our project is dedicated to bike safety in our city and among our school mates. We established the partnership with the cyclists community in our city to promote the convenient safe behavior with the support of professionals and the traffic police.
The ideas
In the beginning of March 2018 our school team decided to take part in the global project dedicated to safety on the roads. The year 2018 is announced to be the year of ecology in Russia that is why the amount of cyclists in the streets has increased because many drivers gave up their vehicles and now use bikes. What’s more, Russia is a host country for the World Cup 2018 and our city is expecting lots of guests and tourists this summer. Many streets in the city center will temporarily be turned into pedestrian ones, allowing even more cyclists to get around.
The idea was to analyze relations among pedestrians, drivers and cyclists, as there are accidents on the roads, which involve all categories of traffic participants. Cyclists are less protected participants or road traffic, the most vulnerable ones. We decided to begin with gaining knowledge about not only basic traffic rules, but also about tricky moments on the roads.
To clear it up we established a partnership with “Velosamara” (it’s a club that unites cyclists in our city and organizes various events) in order to become fully-fledged participants of the club and their organized events. "Velosamara" gave us great support and made a lot of interesting and important areas available for us.
The initiatives
We organised an open seminar (lection) with the help of the representative of “Velosamara” and a traffic cop, involving students of Samara Medical Technical Lyceum during which we got acquainted with basic traffic rules for cyclists and how to behave in complicated cases on the roads.
We took part in the "Opening of bike season 2018", which was scheduled on the 21st of April; students from our school who use bikes were welcomed to take part in it. This event led us to the idea of spreading information of road safety rules among students from Samara Medical Technical Lyceum, in order to be sure, that our students are be safe while riding a bike.
As our main idea was to get students from our school acquainted with traffic rules and popularize accuracy on the roads, the following initiatives have been taken:
1) We initiated to organize a parking area for cyclists from our school in order to create convenient safekeeping for their bikes, with the support of school authorities.
2) After that we developed a bilingual (in English and in Russian) list of easy-to-understand rules to popularize them among students from our lyceum and make them accessible to native and foreign audience, who might be potential cyclists.
3) Another event we took part in was filming of short videos, where simulated situations were expressed in order to visualize the rules we have developed.
4) At last in the end of school year in May 2018 our team came up with the initiative to give short practical classes in our school in order to spread Road Safety Rules when riding a bike among our school mates. We entered 12 classrooms with students aged 12 to 17 and gave a lightning talk using our self-created brochures and showing short videos on "what is good" and "what is bad" riding a bike in the big city.
We believe we did a great job! It was pleasure to hear aknowledgements from our teachers, from our mates, from their parents. We got unpredictable support from the traffic police who admitted that such initiatives are important and very useful. While working on the project we heard about accidents on the roads, where cyclists were harmed, that had just happened (traffic police shared with us) - all of those could have been avoided if only drivers and cyclists respected the rules of the road and were carefully aware of the CORRECT traffic rules. Unfortunately, our small research and our project showed that most city bike-riders do not perceive themeselves as "drivers", are not aware of traffic rules they must obey. Thanks to the Your Ideas Your Initiatives Project our community was sparked with interest in the responsibility of cyclists on the roads. We really hope that the sad statistics of accidents on the roads will get better in Samara this summer and ever after!
