The European project STARS (Sustainable Travel Accreditation and Recognition for Schools) gathers nine implementation partners around one common goal: to increase the number of pupils cycling to and from school, who would previously have been escorted by car. How do we get pupils out of cars and onto their bikes? This is the main question that the STARS project intends to answer in order to change the current situation. STARS believes that the answer lies in: targeting schools that have an impact on the road network in terms of congestion, safety and public transport delay; guiding, encouraging and providing the tools for schools to increase cycling levels and reduce the number of accidents with young people; encouraging schools to work independently as a community to commit to monitoring and evaluating their travel activity. STARS runs until March 2016 and is supported through the Intelligent Energy Europe programme. During the three years of the project, a toolkit of dedicated measures will be developed and tested, which can also be transferred to other local authorities in order to have an impact which goes beyond the nine partner sites and continues after the project’s lifetime.
