Projects

TravelSafe Road Shows

PROJECT AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

To familiarise primary school children who will be transferring to middle school (Year 4) with bus and train services, in order to promote the use of public transport and reduce car use on the school run.

· To allow pupils, particularly those due to transfer to Middle School, to become more familiar with public transport, their use and available services;

· To improve standards of behaviour on public transport;

· To help children develop the confidence to travel independently;

· To reduce car use with subsequent improvements in congestion and the environment;

· Public transport services may improve if there is an increase in passenger numbers.

This has been now a successful project initiated from the IWC STP and run at the beginning of each year since the RDO has been in post. Working in partnership with Island Line, the CRP and Wightbus, to date we have had 8 schools take part, all form which we have had an excellent feedback, collected and disseminated by Helen Stichbury STP.

Each time the school is met by Wightbus and given a talk and presentation in the School by Nigel Johnson about bus safety, before being transported to Ryde St Johns, where then the General Manager of Island Line or the RDO will give a brief talk on railway history and information.

This is then followed by an on the platform safety talk before taking the train to Shanklin, where the conductor will sell tickets to the children who have been issued plastic money by the school for the journeys.

At Shanklin they are then met again by Wight Bus for the journey back to school and lunch!

2007

2008

The roadshows happen usually at the begining of the year when both Island Line and Wightbus are quieter.

Primary School CRP visit

The successful road shows have now led to the RDO going into Primary Schools to talk about TravelSafe and encourage year 4 groups to take up the offer of the road shows from the school to the station ready for their transition to middle schools.

This has been taken up by Ryde, Sandown and Brading, the latter incorporating TravelSafe and using the posters for a safety week they had before the February half term.

All the children were very excited to have someone from the ‘railway’ though were more focussed on the more gruesome aspect of the dangers around trains, which hadn’t actually been covered in the detail they were certainly relaying to the RDO.

In particular one little 6 year old girl was absolutely adamant that her brother had seen someone hit by a high speed train at Brading, and when they went to see if the little boy in question was OK, all they could find were his shoes, which the RDO was reliably informed were a size 5.

2009