How Prue Oswin achieved better outcomes for safe children’s travel

After graduating with degrees in Geography and Environmental Engineering, Prue Oswin spent eight years as a water engineer before switching to active transport in 2009. 

Ever since then, Prue has been deeply involved in making her home region of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland a better place to walk and ride, especially for children. 

Prue began her career working within local government, then for a traffic engineering company. Later Prue set up her own consultancy that she ran for almost a decade. 

Recently she’s joined the Planning Institute of Australia as State Manager for Queensland and the Northern Territory.  

Prue wrote this very widely read article about her work, particularly highlighting evidence-based active transport planning and save independent travel for children, that we refer to extensively in our conversation. 

Two great quotes from Prue: 

“We don’t build our bridges where people are swimming across the river. Where people are too frightened to go, we’re not going to get traffic volumes data that tells us that.” 

“Having a road network without safe crossings is like having a Meccano set without the nuts!” 

Here is a link to the website of Carloine Criado Perez, author of the book Invisible Women, that Prue refers to in this episode. 

Prue refers to the Ride Score Program that has helped substantially increase the number of children riding to school. 

Prue uses CompassIOT data. “Cheaper, faster, evidence-based.” 

Prue talks about the ScootSchool program that she created for training young people about safe walking, riding and scooting. 

 

What’s Up? 

In our What’s Up Section, Irene spoke about the iMove grant that they’d just been awarded to conduct this important project. 

She also mentioned that Ride Score, a project that our guest Prue Oswin has interacted with in Queensland, that is run by We Ride Australia, has just won an iMove grant to expand into Perth, Western Australia. 

Irene gave a call to action for anyone wanting to report problems with their local infrastructure to use the See.Sense app and finally, she mentioned the See.Sense newsletter that is called Signals. 

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