Sustainable Transportation in Action: There's a New Kind of Bus Afoot by Elise Houghton

Greenest City is a non-profit organisation working with Toronto's diverse communities to ensure urban sustainability. Their Safe Routes to School project offers cleaner air, safer streets, active children and parents, local action on global warming, and a down-to-earth lesson in sustainable transportation. The program is poised to go national and involves mapping the neighbourhoods for safe routes, organizing 'walking school buses' and establishing no-idling zones around schools.

Remember walking to school in your childhood? Until the 1970s most urban children went to school in environmentally-friendly, cost-efficient fashion - on foot. Along the way, they enjoyed the company of siblings and friends and got a bit of healthy exercise. But a study by the British Policy Studies Institute in the early 1990's showed that the percentage of children aged seven and eight allowed to go to school on their own has steadily declined from 80% in the 1970s to less than 10% today.

This same trend is evident in North America. With growing traffic congestion in urban centres and concern about child molestation or abduction on the rise, more and more parents are routinely driving their children even short distances to school. The result: more traffic, fewer pedestrians on city streets, less active children and adults, and poor air quality in school neighbourhoods. And for conscientious parents, there's now the added concern of contributing to global climate change every time they start up the car.

A new movement is afoot these days that could reverse this trend. It started in Denmark, then spread to England and Australia, by parents who were concerned about the high number of traffic fatalities involving children. The programs focus on children's safety through a combination of "traffic calming" techniques, environmental education and awareness, and community involvement.

Greenest City is a non profit organisation, working with Toronto's diverse communities on action-oriented environmental campaigns and projects to ensure urban sustainability. Their projects address green infrastructure, energy efficiency, community gardening, composting, and transportation solutions. The Safe Routes to School project helps empower school communities to take direct action in reclaiming the neighbourhood streets for their children.

Greenest City's Safe Routes to School program is funded by the Toronto Atmospheric Fund, Environment Canada's Action 21, Metro Toronto Community Foundation, and the National Active and Safe Routes to School project.

Greenest City felt that promoting the simple activity of walking could address two important issues: children's safety and global climate change. This program addresses so much more than just these two issues. It also has the potential to improve local air quality, make children (and their parents) more active, foster closer community ties through developing friendships and a feeling of working (and walking) together. The program involves three straightforward activities:

1. Mapping the neighbourhood around the school to help children to get to know their community better, identify safe and unsafe places and highlight traffic hazards. This can be done in primary classrooms as part of the social studies curriculum, involving children in mapping and discussing the safest routes for both walking and cycling to school. Greenest City is using "Blazing Trails Through the Urban Jungle" for this project component, a ready-to-use curriculum piece developed by Transportation Options, a non-profit organisation working locally in Toronto and internationally, facilitating sustainable systems of transportation that promote ecological balance, social equity and economic vitality.

   

2. Introducing "Walking School Buses" which have set routes and are led by parent "bus drivers" who take turns accompanying their own and neighbouring children safely to school. There is one parent/caregiver for every 3 to 4 children, and if the Walking School Bus gets too large, as happened with the Maurice Cody School Walking School Bus, it can split into two.

3. Creating a "no idling" area around schools to encourage motorists to turn off their engines while they wait outside the school.

In the Fall of 1996 Greenest City launched its Safe Routes to School program in three Toronto public schools: John Wanless, Maurice Cody and Howard. John Wanless and Maurice Cody School's first Walking School Buses started in November and they continue to encourage more parents to participate.

In the Spring of 1997 High Park Alternative and Annette Street schools joined the program and later in the year E.T. Crowle in Markham and Newcastle Public School in Durham Region came on board. Newcastle School is unique to the program because it is a rural school. Greenest City is working to bring more schools in the Toronto region on board over the fall and winter of 1997/98. The Toronto Board of Education continues to be an active partner in the project and they have incorporated Safe Routes to School into their Greening Schools Program.

Walking School Bus In Action Lisa Niblet, a volunteer parent "bus driver" with the John Wanless Walking School Bus, walks to school two days a week and loves the freedom the program gives her. Her bus got started when Greenest City attended an open house at John Wanless school and invited interested parents to mark their home locations with yellow dots on a large map of their community. At the end of the evening the groupings of dots offered a simple visual way to suggest which families might get together to form their own Walking School Bus. The "drivers" then organised a regular schedule - in Lisa's case, one day on, three days off. Lisa and other parent drivers in her group find that their Walking School Bus helps get children organized in the mornings and restores a feeling of community. The children have fun walking together, and parents enjoy each other's company and have the satisfaction of leaving their cars at home. Lisa says, "It's a bit like an exercise class. Where you might feel tempted to drive on a cold day if you had to go on your own, participation in the bus keeps you walking." Besides being neighbourly and fun, the Walking School Bus serves as a reminder to everyone in the community of the health, safety and environmental advantages of such eminently sustainable transportation. Greenest City recently learned that some mothers at Bowmore Public School, where the Safe Routes to School Program was adopted by the school's Health and Safety Committee, have already been walking in their own "guerrilla" school bus for 2 years. They've been doing it to get quality time with their children and neighbours on the healthful jaunt to school. Together they have taught their children street safety and have gained the support of their community. The neighbourhood knows the children and the children know their neighbourhood. The mothers feel proud that the passing cars know and recognize the walking school bus, slowing down and waving as they pass.

The Safe Routes to School program has attracted lots of attention from across the country and, as a result, Greenest City, in partnership with Active Living: Go For Green!, Health Canada and the Canadian Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance have started work on a National Active and Safe Routes to School program.

Other communities are following Greenest City's lead and implementing Safe Routes to School programs. These include Newcastle, Hamilton/Wentworth and Fredericton, New Brunswick. Newcastle and Fredericton are the first pilots under the national program.

For more information on Safe Routes to School or the Walking School Bus contact:

Greenest City Jacky Kennedy SRTS Co-ordinator tel: (416)488-7263 fax: (416)488-2296 email: ntgc@web.net

Greenest City's projects also include the Backyard Shade Tree Project, Multicultural Greening Project (community gardening, tree planting and composting), and Kensington Vermiculture Project. Greenest City hopes to reinstate its Bicycle Delivery Pilot in the near future and is looking forward to the launch of "No Energy to Waste", a demand management campaign within the commercial sector. For more information call: (416) 977-7626 or visit our web site: http://www.web.net/~greenest

Jacky Kennedy is Greenest City's Transportation and Safe Routes to School Coordinator. She is a founding member of Greenest City and the North Toronto Green Community, dedicated environmentalist and community organizer who is most concerned with finding practical solutions for environmental sustainability. Kennedy designed the Safe Routes to School project to be a practical and active model of sustainable transportation after studying school community traffic program models in other jurisdictions.

Steven Peck is the principal of Peck & Associates, a firm dedicated to identifying and implementing 'win-win' policies and programmes in support of sustainable development. Over the past seven years he has worked on a wide variety of initiatives that involve economic and environmental progress by governments, associations and the private sector.

Richard Morris is the manager of the City of Toronto's Energy Efficiency Office.

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