[sustran] [World Streets Daily] Walk to School strikes again (From the New York Times)

[Eric Britton (Paris, France)]

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/world/europe/27bus.html?ref=europe]
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mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} This good article from today’s New
York Times treats a topic which is not only well known to the New
Mobility Agenda program and its many collaborators around the world,
but also touches on some of the fundamental considerations which
constitute the vital underpinnings of the strategy which will allow us
in many ways to cut CO2 radically and provide far better transportation
(better in the larger sense of the word as we understand it here). When
in 2002 our editor in chief was chair of the international jury of the
prestigious Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities, he and the
jury selected the International Walk to School program as one of the
select group of prize winners. The award, a striking sculpted glob made
of recycled glass, was presented to Robert Smith as project manager of
the UK Walk to School program at that time, on the understanding that
each year it would circulate to another country program. In time it
spanned several continents. The simple fact is that this is a great and
worthy sustainability strategy and should be [art of every new mobility
program in every town and city in the world.

March 27, 2009
Students Give Up Wheels for Their Own Two Feet By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL,
New York Times (Thuis article reproduced under our Fair Use policy.)

LECCO, Italy — Each morning, about 450 students travel along 17 school
bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this lakeside city at the
southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school buses.

In 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local
traffic jams and — most important — a rise in global greenhouse gases
abetted by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a
retro-radical concept: children should walk to school.

They set up a piedibus (literally foot-bus in Italian) — a bus route
with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a mix of paid staff members
and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests lead lines of
walking students along Lecco’s twisting streets to the schools’ gates,
Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands.

At the Carducci School, 100 children, or more than half of the
students, now take walking buses. Many of them were previously driven
in cars. Giulio Greppi, a 9-year-old with shaggy blond hair, said he
had been driven about a third of a mile each way until he started
taking the piedibus. “I get to see my friends and we feel special
because we know it’s good for the environment,” he said.

Although the routes are each generally less than a mile, the town’s
piedibuses have so far eliminated more than 100,000 miles of car travel
and, in principle, prevented thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from
entering the air, Dario Pesenti, the town’s environment auditor,
estimates.

The number of children who are driven to school over all is rising in
the United States and Europe, experts on both continents say, making up
a sizable chunk of transportation’s contribution to greenhouse-gas
emissions. The “school run” made up 18 percent of car trips by urban
residents of Britain last year, a national survey showed.

In 1969, 40 percent of students in the United States walked to school;
in 2001, the most recent year data was collected, 13 percent did,
according to the federal government’s National Household Travel Survey.

Lecco’s walking bus was the first in Italy, but hundreds have cropped
up elsewhere in Europe and, more recently, in North America to combat
the trend.

Towns in France, Britain and elsewhere in Italy have created such
routes, although few are as extensive and long-lasting as Lecco’s. In
the United States, Columbia, Mo.; Marin County, Calif.; and Boulder,
Colo., introduced modest walking-bus programs last year as part of a
national effort, Safe Routes To School, which gives states money to
encourage students to walk or ride their bicycles.

Although carbon dioxide emissions from industry are declining on both
continents, those from transportation account for almost one-third of
all greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States and 22 percent in
European Union countries. Across the globe, but especially in Europe,
where European Union countries have pledged to reduce greenhouse gas
production by 2012 under the United Nations’ Kyoto protocol, there is
great pressure to reduce car emissions.

Last year the European Environmental Agency warned that car trips to
school — along with food importing and low-cost air travel — were
growing phenomena with serious implications for greenhouse gases.

In the United States and in Europe, “multiple threads are warping
traditional school travel and making it harder for kids to walk,” said
Elizabeth Wilson, a transportation researcher at the Humphrey Institute
of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Among those factors
are a rise in car ownership; one-child families, often leery of sending
students off to school on their own; cuts in school-bus service or
charges for it as a result of school-budget cutbacks and fuel-price
gyrations; and the decline of neighborhood schools and the rise of
school choice, meaning that students often live farther from where they
learn.

Worse still, said Roger L. Mackett, professor at the Center for
Transport Studies at University College in London, there is growing
evidence that children whose parents drive a lot will become
car-dependent adults. “You’re getting children into a lifelong habit,”
he said.

In Lecco, car use has proved a tenacious habit even though the piedibus
has caught on. “Cars rule,” said Augosto Piazza, the founder of the
city’s program, an elfin man with shining blue eyes, a bouncing gait
and a yellow vest. As he “drove” along a bus route on a recent morning,
store owners waved fondly to the familiar packs of jabbering children.

Yet as they pulled up to Carducci School, dozens of private cars were
parked helter-skelter for dropoffs in the small plaza outside as
gaggles of mothers chatted on the sidewalk nearby. “I have two kids who
go to different schools, plus their backpacks are so heavy,” said
Manuela Corbetta, a mother in a black jacket and sunglasses, twirling
her car keys as she explained why her children do not make the
15-minute trek. “Sometimes they have 10 notebooks, so walking really
isn’t practical.”

Some children are dropped off by parents on their way to work, and some
others live outside the perimeter of the piedibus’s reach, although
there are collection points at the edge of town for such children. But
many live right along a piedibus route, Mr. Piazza noted.

Yet other parents praised the bus, saying it had helped their children
master street safety and had a ripple effect within the family. “When
we go for shopping you think about walking — you don’t automatically
use the car,” said Luciano Prandoni, a computer programmer who was
volunteering on his daughter’s route.

The city of Lecco contributes roughly $20,000 annually toward
organizing and providing staff members for the piedibus. The students
perform a public service of sorts: they are encouraged to hand out
warnings to cars that park illegally and chastise dog owners who do not
clean up.

Naturally some children whine on rainy mornings. Participation drops 20
percent on such days, although it increases during snowfalls. On rainy
days, “She says, ‘Mom, please take me,’ and sometimes I give in,” said
Giovanna Luciano, who lives in the countryside and normally drops her
daughter Giulia, 9, at a piedibus pickup point in a parking lot by a
cemetery.

To encourage use, children receive fare cards that are punched each
day. The bus routes have distinctive names (the one through the
graveyard is the mortobus), and compete for prizes like pizza parties
for the students. Teachers have students write poems about the piedibus.

In Britain, about half the local school systems now have some sort of
incentives to encourage walking, although generally less formal ones
than the piedibus, said Roger L. Mackett, a professor at the Center for
Transport Studies at University College in London.

“It’s quite a lot of effort to keep it going,” he said. “It’s always
easier to put children in the back of the car. Once you’ve got your two
or three cars, it takes effort not to use them.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Source and fair use: This article originally appeared in the New York
Times of 27 March 2009, by their reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal. You can
view their original article here. And click here to view World Street's
policy on Fair Use. Comments welcome.


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Posted By Eric Britton (Paris, France) to World Streets Daily at
3/27/2009 06:43:00 PM
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