Home-school routes and child psychology: the smartness in small steps

The smartness of a city can be built and developed through many elements that together contribute to its development. One pillar of this elements is the smart mobility, that not always involves technology, planning, infrastructure, but tend to work on the change of citizens behavior, even in the long term. Among them, home-school routes can play a fundamental role; in fact, these routes allow children to use and live public spaces now occupied by vehicles and traffic and to build a culture of sustainable mobility that will see great results when these children become adults. Kids are not small adults and they have a different perception of reality. For this reason, it is necessary to create road signs and markings that are comprehensible for children aged 6-14 when they are engaged in a road environment. Information that users can obtain are based on traffic control devices which are the combination of three elements: shape, color and pictogram. Therefore it is important that message generated by the three elements is understandable by children. In fact, children overcome the phase of syncretism after the age of 6, which corresponds to the phase in which children are unable to analyses and syntheses. The research target is to design road signs and markings for children, to ensure safety of home-school routes. This paper collects the main principles about children psychology and describes a traffic control devices study to be conducted for Cagliari’s project on road safety.