Safe Environments and Mobility for Primary-School Children: A Low-Cost Smart-Urbanism Pipeline for Sustainable School Mobility in Bolzano, Italy

Sustainable urban mobility requires school routes that support active travel while limiting traffic-related pollution and infrastructure barriers. This study presents a low-cost, open-source pipeline for assessing air quality and cycling infrastructure to inform sustainable school-mobility planning. The platform integrates environmental sensing with on-device computer vision, complemented by structured field observation. An exploratory campaign covered five primary schools and connecting bicycle routes in Bolzano, Italy, collecting 9879 records over 9.2 h. The recorded mean PM2.5 concentrations ranged from 0.40 to 9.45 µg m−3 at school sites and reached 24.14 µg m−3 during bicycle-mounted transit, highlighting the importance of examining routes alongside school surroundings. Field observations identified cycling provision at all sites, with unidirectional access at one school. Computer vision demonstrated integration feasibility rather than validated infrastructure assessment. The sustainability contribution is an accessible approach to generating local evidence for healthier active travel, school-street interventions, and cycling-network improvements. With calibration and repeated term-time monitoring, the approach could support municipalities in integrating environmental quality into child-friendly, sustainable urban planning.