A local campaign targeting youth mobility makes for an excellent way to involve the schools in their city's transition towards a sustainable future!
The sanitary crisis and the increasingly visible effects of the pandemic are likely to overshadow scholars' enthusiastic start of the new school year. The imposed safety conditions and necessary social distancing might cast a haze over the impatience of every beginning, over the curiosity and thirst to learn, over the children’s need to interact whether they barely know each other or they just get together after the holidays.
In this situation, the Traffic Snake Game (TSG) campaign can help the little ones by bringing their smiles back and giving them a playful tool to protect themselves and respect security measures, but also travel sustainably to school.
TSG started as a small project in Flanders (Belgium), becoming a European-wide campaign over the years. The Traffic Snake Game Network project was co-financed in 2014-2017 by the European Union's Intelligent Energy Europe programme. For the first three years, the campaign was organised in parallel in 20 European countries. After the first two years of project, Romania became a top TSG country, having the highest number of pupils to achieve significant fuel and CO2 emission savings.
Over 8,000 scholars in Romania have registered to the 7th edition of TSG. Every year, the campaign is linked to the European Mobility Week. The 48 schools will play TSG between September 21st and October 2nd, in 12 cities, amongst which Brasov is one of the most experienced participating municipalities.
In Romania, the Traffic Snake is named OSCAR and throughout the precedent editions, it led to impressive CO2 savings of approximately 60 tonnes and over 350.000 km of sustainable trips, involving more than 55.000 pupils. TSG encourages walking and cycling to school, having primary school children, parents and teachers as the main target group.
The municipality of Brasov has enrolled 1,700 scholars to TSG 2020 and the campaign is locally coordinated by TOMORROW's partner ABMEE - Brasov Energy Management Agency. Over the last editions, Brasov involved around 12,000 students, achieving 80,000 km of sustainable trips and approximately 15 tonnes of saved CO2 emissions.
Although based on teachers’ voluntary involvement, requiring some effort on their behalf, the campaign reached high appreciation among students and educators. Extraordinary results have been achieved due to their continuous and numerous participations every year.