In December 2004, Continental, in cooperation with the state traffic safety boards in Germany, started a campaign for more safety on the way to school under the slogan "We reward your safety". Continental promoted more than 50 projects nationwide aimed at improving safety on the way to school. These included installing traffic lights, moving pedestrian crossings and training older schoolchildren to be bus angels and accompany younger children on school buses. The series of projects came to an end in October 2007.

We plan to pursue two central topics that emerged from the "We Reward Your Safety" campaign. One is the "Bus School" project, aimed at helping children to get to school safely by bus. Every year in Germany, around 9,000 children are injured on the way to school by bus. They often do not know how they should  behave at the bus stop, when getting on and off, in the bus, and when crossing the street. Pushing and shoving at the bus stop, vandalism and aggressive behavior in the bus – these are part and parcel of everyday school life for many schoolchildren, young and old alike. Despite the fact that, statistically speaking, buses represent the safest way of getting to school and back, there are risks and problems to be overcome. As a result, many schoolchildren are unsure.

On behalf of Continental, the University of Lüneburg created the "Taking the Bus to School" manual (only in German), which is geared to teachers, parents, and employees of transportation companies and organizations. You can order the manual on CD via e-mail from simone.schwarzer@conti.de.

A new campaign for more safety for children has launched nationwide in May 2008 – the web-based SchoolRoute Planner. So far, about 950 schools are participating. For years now, elementary schools in Germany have been making maps to guide first graders to school. In the past, many of these only consisted of a photocopy of the town map with a route drawn in using felt tip pen. The web-based SchoolRoute Planner makes it possible to record footpaths, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and accident-prone spots systematically so that safe routes to school can be planned with accuracy.

This is how it works: go to http://www.schulwegplaner.de/ and simply enter your postal code and/or town. Then you can see whether there is already a school route map for your school. If not, users are urged to get busy and create a map for the school required. To do this, users first have to register with the SchoolRoute Planner Internet portal and then they can use an interactive program to create their school route map. The map can be supplemented step-by-step and modified at any time on the user's own computer. Depending on where the schoolchild lives, it is possible to input, save and print out individual routes.

However, before a map can be made available for general use in the public area of the SchoolRoute Planner, the schools in question have to check and approve it. Schools are requested to have all maps verified by the local authorities – in particular the police. Only then can they be opened and printed out by all Internet users.

In September 2008, the SchoolRoute Planner received very special recognition in a competition run by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. Entitled "Routes into the Web", the ministry's initiative awards projects that make people more Internet savvy. The platform www.SchulwegPlaner.de, part of a traffic safety project sponsored by the international automobile supplier and the Lower Saxony traffic safety association, took first place amongst 139 nominations submitted in the "Health & nutrition" category competition.