The Eurocities organization awarded the City of Ljubljana at the annual conference, Eurocities 2013 Ghent for the project “Providing Safety and Equal Opportunities in Traffic for Children & People with Disabilities” in the “Smart Living” category.

The award represents the acknowledgement of our endeavours to improve the quality of life of our citizens, namely the most vulnerable groups, and gives an additional spur for the future.

The project entitled “Providing Safety and Equal Opportunities in Traffic for Children & People with Disabilities” exemplifies a good practice of collaboration between the city authorities and its citizens via the application of digital technologies. It encompasses "Demand - responsive transport for persons with disabilities" provided by the Ljubljana Passenger Transport and the education and schooling programme offering the depiction of safe routes to school maintained and updated by the Pre-School Education and Schooling Department of the MOL City Administration.

Demand - responsive transport for persons with disabilities: It is a door-to-door transport service for the disabled (persons with intellectual, physical and sensing disabilities, persons with head injuries) enabling them to make an important step toward an independent everyday mobility.
In this system a client calls the Ljubljana Passenger Transport call centre and submits a transport request for the specific day and hour. The client immediately receives a feedback on the transport availability and its confirmation within the given possibilities of the Ljubljana Passenger Transport service. The call centre dispatches the request to its bus driver who picks up the passenger at the determined time and place. Thus, disabled persons avoid the unnecessary stressful situation, while the driver is prepared to pick up and attend to such passengers in advance.

Education and Schooling Portal: The portal is designed to assist parents and professional workers in the field of education and schooling. It contains the information on school districts and school routes with the description of dangerous traffic points in the areas of education and schooling institutions. The portal is publicly available and offers the insight into the useful data that helps parents to select the kindergarten or school for their children. The data encompasses the institution location and its surrounding routes (primary school, kindergarten, and music school), traffic lights as well as safe and unsafe routes marked with their respective danger points.

The project “Providing safety and equal opportunities in traffic for children & people with disabilities” also introduces a short presentation video available here.

Details on the annual conference Eurocities 2013 Ghent are available here.