The Plataforma de Infancia (Children’s Platform) is a network of more than 70 children’s organizations working to protect, promote and defend the rights of children and teenagers under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.  

In 2024, the Platform published the document Análisis sobre políticas de movilidad sostenible para la infancia (Analysis of sustainable mobility policies for children) where it examines Spain’s current mobility model that puts private vehicles before public transportation although the former is less effective and more polluting.

Pollution in cities is greater than elsewhere due to traffic, which directly impacts people’s life and health, and particularly children in the midst of their physical and mental development. The cost of public transportation has a great impact on children in vulnerable situations, particularly those between the ages of 6 and 16 for whom public policy is lacking to ensure free public transportation.

This analysis, an initial approach to ascertaining whether mobility policies include a childhood perspective, draws as its main conclusion that free public transportation policy for children and teenagers is lacking, and explains how this impacts children’s rights.

Francesco Tonucci said that "children are a sensitive environmental indicator. If they disappear from the streets, it means the city is sick.”

We don’t want sick cities devoid of children, which is why we are working with the Children’s Platform on different awareness-raising materials.  The first is aimed at raising awareness about other ways for children to gain mobility, and calls for solutions to make paths, access roads, schools and their surroundings safe for children to move about autonomously, but also healthily, free of smoke and traffic and the like, thus fostering their full development.

To make this point, we conceived an audio-visual piece where we wanted to give life to the Children’s Platform. The idea was very simple. A girl with a megaphone standing on top of a car parked on the street is fed up with the prevailing mobility model. From the top of the car, she calls for being able to move about the city freely without fear of traffic or inhaling exhaust fumes. This daring girl on top of the car stands as a powerful, impactful and yet perfectly plausible image. And we work with that possibility. 

Within this same campaign, after the piece starring Cloe, we produced other materials to raise awareness on the impact of transportation costs for children in vulnerable situations and called on city councils to ensure public transportation free of charge for all children under the age of 18, a policy that would also facilitate access to rural areas and essential services (schools, health centres, hospitals, and so forth).

 It would take so little to apply a childhood perspective to mobility policies…