by frog
Tomorrow Jeanette is joining the students of Wadestown School on their school walking bus as they make their way to school. School walking buses are becoming an increasingly popular and simple solution to the myriad of linked issues around climate change, road safety, exercise, community engagement and peak oil.
And yet, as Deborah at In a Strange Land notes, it says something about our values that we have invested such effort into removing this one demographic of society, children, off our roads and back on to footpaths. She has an interesting post where she questions why it is that we expect children to walk to school, but don’t place the same moral judgements on adults about walking to work?
I hear on-going, constant criticism of parents. And it’s all oriented at clearing out the roads for the important people, the grown-ups who are not responsible for children.
I have a much better solution available for congested roads. People caring for children should have first call on using cars, to enable them to get children to school, and to get themselves to work. People who don’t have childcare responsibilities should get up 20 or 30 minutes earlier in the morning, so that they can walk to work, or if necessary, use public transport.
I don’t agree with Deborah’s modest proposal; I think walking buses are great. But I do think it is worth exploring which groups within our communities (with regard to gender, ethnicity and age) are contributing the most to stop climate change and which groups could do more. How many large law firms or corporate banks also have walking buses similar to those in schools?
Published in Environment & Resource Management | Society & Culture by frog on Tue, March 4th, 2008
Tags: children, climate change, community engagement, Deborah, exercise, In a Strange Land, Jeanette Fitzsimons, parents, peak oil, road safety, Wadestown School, Walking buses
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
“I do think it is worth exploring which groups within our communities (with regard to gender, ethnicity and age) are contributing the most to stop climate change”
Those who don’t breed, by a very very long margin. An inconvenient truth I know.
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Great, just what we need. More feminist extremism. Making the cause the solution is absurd.
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parentalist rather than feminist!
but yeah, when the childless are already subsidizing the education & healthcare for children it’s a bit rude to suggest they should also get off the roads to make way for them
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lol but I thought a walking bus was specifically for kids so they could be safe as the parents are watching over them while everyone got a bit of social interaction? A ‘law firm bus’? ‘Right J. Thomas Reid III we’ll pick you up at 7-30, then we’ll go to to Kenneth’s house at 7-40 (be on time this time Kenneth)’.
Or do i just have the wrong idea about what a walking bus is??
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Stephen, that’s exactly it. It fails with dolts for the same reason as car-pooling does – most dolts are far to selfish to allow it to work.
Personally, I prefer to ride my bike. It’s faster, it goes exactly where I need to go, and it goes there exactly when I want to do. The benefits to society from that is that I only use 1/10th to 1/40th the road space, and of course don’t damage the pavement or the air nearly as much. But I will probably live longer so I’ll cost more in the long term.
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live longer! what with the risk of being flattened, breathing in the other vehicles’ emissions, arriving at your destination sweaty with nowhere to have a shower & change, so that you catch a cold (as well as drive off all your potential friends!) you might just be killing yourself faster!
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Moz – I’d be happy with a law firm pedalling bus as an alternative to the walking bus.
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now that’s something people would pay to see!
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Why force kids to walk to school when we don’t force adults to walk to work?
(1) most adults have further to go to get to work than kids do to go to school. I know some adults who like walking to work, but they have to set aside a fair amount of time for it.
(2) most kids actually prefer walking to school (unless the rain is so heavy that it gets inside their raincoats). Mostly dropping kids off at the school gate is just a way for parents to be control freaks.
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There is no need for government involvement, but walking school buses are excellent – far far more effective than public transport, and definitely a great step forward. I used to walk to work in Wellington (good half hour too) and it was far preferable to the 15-20 minute bus ride.
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The basic flaw in Deborah’s argument is town planning. For most of the last 50 years town planning allowed schools to be built within walking distance of homes but it prohibited businesses being located that close to new homes. Our grandparents could walk to work in Woolston or Sydenham because thats where they lived. Very unhealthy. So instead of a Clean Air Act to clean up factory chimneys we got a Town Planning Act to seperate factories from houses. A conspiracy by the roading lobby or just another brainchild of parliament?
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Good thing not many people work in factories any more then eh?
Hey frog what would be the consequences of
be? If we had the information, what would you like done with that? Or is it just academic?
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Hopefully it’s more than academic. It’s about making sure that our solutions to climate change are socially just and equitable. For instance we don’t want people in poverty cutting down on heating to cut back their emissions, when we could achieve the same thing more equitably by investing taxes in insulation etc. You could equally apply a similar social fairness lens to air travel, deforestation and the dairy industry for instance.
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investing taxes in insulation is both effective and efficient. Those are the first two tests that solutions to climate change should have to pass. The best solutions are always going to be those that can be implemented quickly and have a high benefit/cost ratio. On that basis the walking school bus beats the North Shore busway hands down. With the money spent on the busway we could have had walking school buses at every school in every town and suburb, fully OSH compliant, with paid supervisors and highway patrol protection. Equally importantly most of the trips avoided would have been entirely during the mega high polluting cold start distance of the average car. The busway only eliminates the cold start part of the homeward journey. Bigger bang for your buck. Just not as many photo ops for Her Republican Highness.
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The “Get Across” campaign … here is some info for Aucklanders wanting to cycle or walk across the harbour bridge. Some is from the NZ Herald.
Cycle Action has launched an online campaign to build public support for cycling and pedestrian crossings for the bridge … Elite Auckland athletes, including Ironman champions Jo Lawn and Cameron Brown and Olympian Hamish Carter, gave their blessing to the “Get Across” campaign in which the public is invited to log their support or opposition on a new website .
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