The City of Toronto adopted its Vision Zero Road Safety Plan in July 2016, with its focus on eliminating motor vehicle collisions that result in death and serious injuries. The safety plan emphasizes a collaborative and integrative approach, involving multiple stakeholders. One of the plan's six areas of emphasis is on school children. Stakeholders have worked with the City of Toronto's Transportation Services Division to identify a package of interventions to create School Safety Zones. These zones will include physical environment changes, enforcement activities, education and support from a school traffic management facilitator. The Road Safety Plan is intended to be evidence-based and data-driven. Therefore, it is essential that policy makers and researchers work together to develop appropriate evaluation strategies. To describe the challenges in developing an evaluation strategy for Toronto's Vision Zero school zone safety program. There are several target groups that will benefit from this process of addressing the challenges in developing an evaluation strategy Toronto's Vision Zero school zone safety program, including other researchers and vision zero policy makers, schools and the general public. Stakeholders including Green Communities Canada, Toronto Public Health, Toronto District School Board and Toronto Police Service, along with researchers from the Hospital for Sick Children and York University are working together with Transportation Services to develop an evaluation plan for the School Safety Zones program to be rolled out over the next 5 years in the City of Toronto. There are several challenges to researchers and policy makers working together, most of which can be overcome using a collaborative process. For example, funding cycles and priorities of academic granting agencies that researchers access to fund their work may not match the timelines and priorities of policy makers. Priority setting and sampling can be different, with researchers preferring evidence-based priority setting and random selection to enhance scientific validity, whereas policy makers may also consider political priorities and community interests. Although researchers would ideally like to maximize sample size, policy makers often have fiscal restraints. One of the most important challenges is defining outcome measurements. Collisions involving fatalities and severe injuries are relatively rare, so proxy measures that are meaningful and valid must be agreed upon prior to the evaluation. These may include measures of driver behaviour, such as speed and double parking, which have both been previously investigated in Toronto schools. Regular meetings of stakeholders working together will help ensure evaluation that is meaningful to policy makers and scientifically sound. This process will lead to a strategy to be used by City of Toronto, Transportation Services to evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions related to school zone safety. This collaborative process described can provide a model for future evaluations of Vision Zero Road Safety Plan interventions.<\/p>\n
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