Home Zones represent an initiative to recreate heavily traffic calmed neighbourhoods where people on foot or on bikes share the street space with those in cars. Home Zones have community as well as transport objectives, providing a way of responding to community concerns, and generating community level spin-offs.
Our brief was to determine the extent to which the projects met a range of environmental, community and traffic objectives. Two of the four projects included in the pilot failed to reach implementation stage. The other two demonstrated a range of benefits, but also lessons for other schemes in Scotland to learn from.
This was a multidisciplinary study involving social scientists, community specialists, transport planners and environmental consultants. We used a series of before and after studies, together with process monitoring to evaluate and learn from the pilots, including those that did not succeed. The work highlighted funding issues, with schemes costing up to £1million each, but also the benefits of full community involvement.
