• City Hall
  • Province House
  • Education
  • Environment
  • Investigation
  • Journalism
  • Commentary
  • @Tim_Bousquet
  • Log In

Halifax Examiner

An independent, adversarial news site in Halifax, NS

  • Home
  • About
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Commenting policy
  • Archives
  • Contact us
  • Subscribe
  • Donate
  • Manage your account
  • Swag
You are here: Home / Education / The downward trend in walking to school

The downward trend in walking to school

September 6, 2016 By Erica Butler 4 Comments

Walking_School_Bus

Strength and safety in numbers. A walking school bus, image courtesy of Ecology Action Centre

Halifax’s kids head back to school this week, but sadly too many of them will be taking the least healthy option to get there.

Walking and biking to school have been on the decline across North America for decades. Check out these numbers from the US, showing the drop since 1969. Note that while bussing stays nearly constant, the proportions of kids walking and being driven has almost flipped, and for the worse.

Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 12.42.52 PM

The negative effects of this trend are multiple: fewer active kids, worse rush-hour traffic, and more greenhouse gas emissions. It’s what you might call a lose-lose-lose situation.

In Nova Scotia, communities vary from 15-20 per cent of kids walking to school. At least that’s what Janet Barlow told me last year, right around the time the provincial government was cutting funding to the EAC’s School Travel Planning program, where Barlow worked.

The School Travel Planning program was aimed squarely at getting kids out of their parents’ cars every morning and afternoon. Two staffers, one in Halifax and one in Sydney, worked with 24 schools across the province to help plan safe walking routes, lobby for trails and marked crosswalks, and create things like “walking school buses.” The beauty of the program was that it was customized to each school community, looking at specific problems and how they could be overcome. Barlow says they saw results with an average 4.5 per cent increase in active transportation at participating schools.

But in a surprise move last year, the province cut the roughly $100,000 in funding that the EAC used to employ the team responsible for school travel planning and other active transportation advocacy programs.

At the time, minister of health and wellness Leo Glavine told Metro that it was okay, because the province would be mandating physical activity for kids during school hours. I’m all for gym class, but it’s no replacement for a physically active, independence-building, daily habit of walking or biking in your own neighbourhood.  A University of Toronto research project found that even kids who walked to school were not meeting ideal activity targets, though they came much closer than their chauffeured peers.

The US National Centre for Safe Routes to School cites research correlating walking to school with a host of benefits for kids:

• Weight and blood pressure control
• Bone, muscle, and joint health and maintenance
• Reduction in the risk of diabetes
• Improved psychological welfare
• Better academic performance

And that’s just the benefits specifically for the kids.  There’s also traffic congestion, air pollution, and GHG emissions to consider, which could do us all a lot of good by going down.

The EAC’s last remaining soldier in the fight to get kids walking again is Julian West, coordinator of Making Tracks, a program that teaches safe skills in walking, cycling, skateboarding, roller blading, and scootering. West says the EAC is currently waiting to hear about its application for funding to restart school travel planning, from the same department that axed it about a year and a half ago.

But the driving to school trend will take more than a single program to get turned around. We need buy-in from more than just our health departments, but also from our energy, education, transportation, and environment departments. We need buy in from our city planners and our school boards. For starters, we need to make sure our communities continue to have schools that kids can walk to. We need to design streets, sidewalks, and paths in those neighbourhoods to be as safe as possible. We need to slow down, and perhaps start enforcing those school zone speed limits with a little more gusto.

And we need to seriously consider the choice that’s facing those of us who are parents this week:  teach our kids to get to school under their own power, or strap them in and hope that the air pollution, traffic congestion, and sedentary habits we are creating don’t come back to haunt us and them.

Filed Under: Education, Environment, Featured Tagged With: EAC, Ecology Action Centre, Janet Barlow, Julian West, Leo Glavine, Making Tracks, Walking to school

Comments

  1. perkillis says

    September 6, 2016 at 3:04 pm

    I’d be interested in how this correlates with households having two working parents. I suspect there are a lot of factors at hand. I tried last year, but couldn’t walk my first-grader to school in the morning and get the bus to work on time. And even if there had been an after-school walking school bus, there wasn’t anyone home once he would have arrived there.

    Log in to Reply
  2. Colin May says

    September 6, 2016 at 6:55 pm

    French Immersion elementary students in Dartmouth take a bus to the school in Shannon Park. At Junior High they take a bus to Bicentennial, previousy the bus went to Prince Arthur.
    If the Dartmouth school board had decided in 1985 to introduce French at Grade 3 there would have been no need for bus travel and the waste of time and fuel, and all children would have been studying French on a daily basis.
    Of course packing kids on a bus is good for parents because they are out the door early and are gone almost all day, thus reducing the cost of childcare at lunch and after school.

    Log in to Reply
  3. Steve says

    September 7, 2016 at 6:49 am

    I used to walk and bike 1-2 km to school daily when I was younger, in good ol’ Sussex, NB. There is a pretty significant effect on early independence in kids who regularly engage in AT to get to school. It certainly perked me up for my days in school when I was younger. I took a 20’ish year break from cycling, but re-invested in it while in university and found that I was very often way more alert in the mornings after my ride and I felt much happier on days that I cycled. It was an 8-10km commute at the time.

    Log in to Reply
  4. Tim Covell says

    September 8, 2016 at 1:19 pm

    Another factor in driving kids to school rather than letting them walk is the increased fear of crime, helped by regular news stories of missing children and sex offenders (which significantly misrepresent both the frequency and the source of these dangers). Sad to see yet another low cost and successful program scrapped by the province.

    Log in to Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Tideline, with Tara Thorne

Brian Borcherdt. Photo: Anna Edwards-Borcherdt

Brian Borcherdt came of age in Yarmouth in the 1990s. When he arrived in Halifax, the city’s famous music scene was already waning, and worse, the music he made was rejected by the cool kids anyway. After decades away from Nova Scotia, he and his young family have settled in the Annapolis Valley, where he’ll zoom in to chat with Tara about his band Holy Fuck’s endlessly delayed tour, creating the Dependent Music collective, and the freedom and excitement of the improvised music he’s making now. Plus: Bringing events back in 2021.

The Tideline is advertising-free and subscriber-supported. It’s also a very good deal at just $5 a month. Click here to support The Tideline.

Uncover: Dead Wrong

In 1995, Brenda Way was brutally murdered behind a Dartmouth apartment building. In 1999, Glen Assoun was found guilty of the murder. He served 17 years in prison, but steadfastly maintained his innocence. In 2019, Glen Assoun was fully exonerated.

Halifax Examiner founder and investigative journalist Tim Bousquet has followed the story of Glen Assoun's wrongful conviction for over five years. Now, Bousquet tells that story as host of Season 7 of the CBC podcast series Uncover: Dead Wrong.

Click here to go to listen to the podcast, or search for CBC Uncover on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast aggregator.

About the Halifax Examiner

Examiner folk The Halifax Examiner was founded by investigative reporter Tim Bousquet, and now includes a growing collection of writers, contributors, and staff. Left to right: Joan Baxter, Stephen Kimber, Linda Pannozzo, Erica Butler, Jennifer Henderson, Iris the Amazing, Tim Bousquet, Evelyn C. White, El Jones, Philip Moscovitch More about the Examiner.

Sign up for email notification

Sign up to receive email notification of new posts on the Halifax Examiner. Note: signing up for email notification of new posts is NOT subscribing to the Halifax Examiner. To subscribe, click here.

Recent posts

  • 1 new case of COVID-19 announced in Nova Scotia on Sunday, Jan. 24 January 24, 2021
  • Reckoning with racism January 24, 2021
  • After reading a Halifax Examiner article, two cops showed up at an author reading at Mount Allison University January 23, 2021
  • A heritage property in Sir Sandford Fleming Park is falling apart. Will the city do anything about it? January 23, 2021
  • Zero new cases of COVID-19 announced in Nova Scotia on Saturday, Jan. 23 January 23, 2021

Commenting policy

All comments on the Halifax Examiner are subject to our commenting policy. You can view our commenting policy here.

Copyright © 2021