School Street Programs at Scale: The Journeys of Rio de Janeiro and Cuenca

Transforming the streets near schools is one of the most strategic moves a city can make to design safer, healthier, and more joyful public spaces for children and their communities. As neighborhood anchors, school environments are central to a child’s daily routine—directly shaping their cognitive and emotional development, independence, and overall well-being.  With more cities adopting a child-centric approach to school environments, the recent experiences of Rio de Janeiro and Cuenca show how cities can move beyond localized and temporary interventions to enhance their impact. By taking a first step, gathering empirical evidence, and aligning municipal partners, their paths offer a practical blueprint for turning big child-focused ambitions into actionable, scalable, citywide change.

Scaling up the impact of Streets for Kids in Latin America

In 2025, the GDCI Streets for Kids program launched a regional call across Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador for the Leadership Accelerator. The overwhelming response highlighted a shared priority: focusing on school environments to transform urban spaces into more welcoming and supportive places for children. Out of the participating cities, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Cuenca, Ecuador, were selected to receive dedicated technical assistance and a seed grant to strengthen and expand their existing local programs.

Cuenca’s Journey: Developing and testing a new evaluation methodology

School-related trips are the second most common travel purpose in Cuenca, accounting for 22% of all local-level mobility, and are primarily taken by children and adolescents. Between 2021 and 2025, the city recorded over 27,000 traffic incidents, with nearly 40% of occurring in school environments. To address road safety risks, support children’s well-being, and encourage more active mobility, the General Directorate of Mobility Management (DGM) and the Mobility, Transit and Transportation Public Company (EMOV EP), alongside local academic partners, initiated the redesign of streets around schools. In 2022, local teams participated in the first cohort of the global Streets for Kids Leadership Accelerator, using the opportunity to develop technical capacity and pilot a street intervention through the Pinceles y Margaritas transformation.

Building on this initial experience, by 2025, the city had established a permanent funding model that allocated 50% of annual vehicle tax revenue to active mobility infrastructure, ensuring sustained expansion of the initiative. With an initial investment of over $75,000 USD, Cuenca completed 12 school street interventions at a steady rate of two to three projects per year, directly improving safety infrastructure for more than 9,000 students. At the time the team applied for support to scale up their initiative, the city had received more than 90 requests from schools to join the program.

Piloting a new evaluation methodology: The Eugenio Espejo school surroundings

The technical assistance focused on two primary components: formalizing the program and producing an operational guide detailing departmental roles, responsibilities, and interagency workflows. This process clarified shared goals among partners and established requirements for evaluating and measuring overall program impact.

To ground the guide in practical experience, the team tested the methodology at the Eugenio Espejo school, aiming to enhance traffic safety, promote active mobility, and foster social well-being. Balancing time and budget constraints with community engagement and evaluation requirements, the team designed the process to remain repeatable for two to three interventions per year. Data collected during the pilot (launched in the first week of the school year) informed the final street design and served as the foundation for the city’s official school street implementation guide.

By standardizing criteria, evaluation metrics, and operational workflows, the guide establishes a scalable foundation for consistent, measurable implementation across Cuenca. The city plans to continue the program cadence, by which they transform between two and three school environments a year. The transformations will now benefit from continuous evaluation, building the case for sustained expansion of the program and a future transition of the interventions into capital construction.

Rio de Janeiro’s Journey: From temporary to permanent transformations

In Rio de Janeiro, nearly half of all municipal students walk to school—a figure that reaches 77% in some neighborhoods. Yet while walking to class, thousands of children navigate a road system that poses significant daily safety risks, culminating in approximately 500 children and adolescents injured or killed in traffic incidents each year. This burden deeply intersects with existing gender and racial disparities: 73% of those accompanying children on these journeys are women, the majority of whom are Black women.

To address road safety risks and promote children’s safer movements in the city, Rio’s mobility agency (CET-Rio), developed a road safety education initiative in partnership with the Municipal Department of Education. Since 2007, the initiative has sought to promote more sustainable mobility options and, through actively listening to students from municipal public schools, to rethink the streets and spaces surrounding schools to make the journey to classrooms safer.

In 2022, the program launched a new phase, offering a replicable methodology for engaging students and implementing tactical interventions, resulting  in over 1,700 educational activities, over 300 risk map co-productions with school children, and over 90 interim transformations around schools. Over the years, the program received multiple international recognitions, including the Pan-American Architecture Biennial of Quito 2022 and the What Works Cities, by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Transitioning to capital construction: The Municipal Tóquio school surroundings

The technical assistance focused on two primary components: identifying potential alignment with other stakeholders in the city to support one pilot’s transition into a permanent transformation, and strengthening the processes for design, engagement, evaluation, implementation, and documentation for future projects.

To this end, the team identified key entry points that would need to be revisited, from changing the way the program is shared and communicated, through prioritizing key program and project metrics, rethinking their design strategies, and expanding their engagement process from one that targeted the school children to one that invites the entire community to understand and respond to the proposed transformation. These processes were then documented in a program guide.

To ground the guide in practical experience, the team tested the methodology in the surroundings of the Municipal Tóquio school, the site of an interim transformation that aligned with the priorities of Rio’s Public Works Department (SECONSERVA) “Accessible Routes” program, which agreed to implement capital improvements, including extending sidewalks and installing pedestrian ramps.

To test the process, CET-Rio worked in collaboration with the local Institute Arata, which organized a community-wide pop-up event and community workshops where CET-Rio was able to test a new engagement tool to facilitate discussions. Doubling down on the program’s long-standing practice of listening to children, the extended engagement process allowed the team to refine the design and consider new opportunities to improve children’s experience of the streets around their schools, such as nearby public spaces.  This experience built the foundation for a new phase for the “On my way to school” program, while offering important lessons for the ongoing practice of its current phase.

What’s the next step for Streets for Kids in your city? 5 Key actions to scale your impact:

• Start with streets near schools: Child-friendly cities should support children’s independent mobility and provide spaces to pause and play across all street types—including residential, commercial, mixed-use, and major thoroughfares. Because school surroundings are primary daily destinations, often evenly distributed across urban areas, and ideal for community engagement, transforming these environments offers an effective entry point for shifting toward citywide child-centered street design.
• Map out your journey: A critical first step is to evaluate existing progress. Mapping past interventions, reviewing previously collected data, and visually communicating impact help build alignment with partners, highlight achievements, and identify operational gaps. While resource-intensive, this inventory process is essential for building institutional support and refining workflows.
• Define actionable next steps: A long-term vision serves as a guide, but cities should tailor their immediate goals to their stage in the process. For example, Cuenca needed a unified methodology to align stakeholders and secure long-term backing, whereas Rio needed to transition a robust program from temporary pilots to permanent infrastructure.
• Ground policy in pilot projects: Pairing policy design with a real-world pilot ensures workflows are realistic and aligned with municipal capacity, timelines, and budgets. High-profile community launches create shared excitement while establishing fixed deadlines that keep interagency partners accountable.
• Institutionalize the process: While early innovations often rely on informal opportunities, borrowed equipment, or volunteer goodwill, scaling an initiative requires formalizing goals, roles, and resources. Establishing official protocols ensures continuous growth, helps identify new opportunities for collaboration and resource allocation, enables long-term planning, and protects the program from turnover.

Scaling up school street programs is a complex journey, but its impact reaches far beyond individual school gates. As the experiences of Rio de Janeiro and Cuenca demonstrate, starting at the school block is a powerful catalyst to spark broader conversations about how cities evaluate and design public spaces. By testing child-focused methodologies and building interagency collaboration near schools, city teams can begin reshaping their everyday planning practices—laying the groundwork to transform urban street networks into safer, healthier, and more joyful places for everyone