Sustainable transport through enabling partnerships

Abstract

This paper describes how a mobile application can be used to establish, improve, and maintain walking buses in Cape Town through enabling and strengthening partnerships between local government, organisations, and communities. Walking buses are groups of students that use set routes to walk to school under adult supervision. Previous walking bus initiatives in Rondebosch, Delft, and throughout Cape Town have shown that there is a need for this kind of programme, but many of these initiatives encountered problems in sustaining the walking buses and getting continuous support from sponsors, stakeholders, and partners. This proposed mobile application aims to assist with these challenges. This will be done by incorporating information from schools and parents, such as start times, convenient drop-off areas, and potential routes. Additionally, parents will be able to track their children through the application and volunteers will be trained and given an incentive for participating in the initiative. This application was not piloted or implemented as part of this research.