When politicians slow-pedal
Our campaign to help our kids walk, cycle and scooter to school has met an enthusiastic response. We’ve been deluged with ideas about how we can improve our roads, improve our driving and yes, improve our attitudes. Now, the Government is to enable lower
School’s out in Prestons, Christchurch. Kids are heading home in twos and threes. They approach Te Rito St intersection. Orange cones line the roadside where contractors are building a new subdivision. Cars come from all directions.
Deborah Cooney is a traffic manager in a hi-vis vest chatting with kids. She halts traffic while they cross the road, and she’s quick to shake out three fingers at speeding cars, yelling ‘‘30!’’
It’s a different approach to the old stop-go signs. Sites are assessed before work begins, and they figure out what they’re going to do for special circumstances, such as for nearby Marshland School at 9am and 3pm.
Lights and signals will soon be installed at a pedestrian crossing on the intersection. Shared pedestrian and cycle paths will link to it along both sides of the road by the end of September.
Courtney Manuel walks her 7-year-old son Tuari to and from school, and feels glad for the help from the traffic manager. Once the work is finished, and her son is a bit older, she’ll probably let him scooter by himself.
The proportion of primary-aged children commuting by car nationwide has almost doubled to 55 per cent in the past 20 years, according to the Ministry of Transport. The mayhem outside school gates sparked the Sunday Star-Times to launch its Foot It campaign in February, promoting ways to boost the number of children walking and cycling to school. The response has been phenomenal.
This weekend, Associate Transport Minister Craig Foss promises new, consistent guidelines to setting speed limits. Already being trialled in the Waikato, the Speed Management Guide will help local authorities and the NZ Transport Agency make ‘‘informed, accurate and consistent decisions’’ on controlling car speeds.
And the key thing? They will be obliged to take into account the concerns of schools and their communities.
1 WALKING BUSES
Remuera’s Anna Jackson is one step ahead. Her walking bus got up and running from outside her home after an ad in the Meadowbank School newsletter last term.
Adult ‘‘bus drivers’’ are rostered each day to steer the children to school. The Auckland Council gave them hi-vis vests and little tickets to be clipped. The council has good reason to help: about 40 per cent of Auckland’s traffic congestion is education-related.
Between 2002 and 2007, nearly 260 young pedestrians were involved in traffic accidents in Auckland City, and more than half of crashes occurred during morning and afternoon travel to and from school.
In inner-city Wellington, Martin Wilson from Aro Valley says his biggest concern is kids walking by themselves and not crossing roads safely. Nationally, about three cycling and three walking school travel trips each day result in an injury, out of 795,000 schoolkids.
Wilson runs a walking bus for his 7-year-old and some neighbours. It’s a no-brainer; fun, safe and healthy. ‘‘Many parents are pushed for time and prefer to have their own flexible timetables in the mornings, which often includes thinking they are saving time by driving. Some parents don’t get themselves and their families out of bed in time.’’
Lower Hutt grandmother Marie Mihaere enjoys walking her grandson to Eastern Hutt School. With about 700 pupils, it’s one of the biggest suburban primary schools in the Wellington region. Car congestion can be a nightmare. A teacher was knocked down one morning last term. ‘‘She had a couple of broken bones. It wasn’t just a little trip over.’’
So why are people so wedded to their cars? ‘‘A lot of the time it’s convenience,’’ Mihaere says. ‘‘Mum heading off to work and dropping the kids off to school on the way or out of zone people who find it too far to walk. We are trying to resolve that by having children dropped off in my street and then us all going together as a walking bus.’’
2 ON YER BIKE
Karen Jaquiery is on a mission in Titahi Bay. Over the past 20 years, the number of kids cycling to school nationwide has dwindled.
In 1990, young teenagers cycled just over eight kilometres each per week. By 2005, they were down to 2.5.
So Jaquiery’s local primary school has made a massive push for bike education. It fundraised to buy school bikes, scooters and skateboards for kids who don’t have them. It also built bike and BMX tracks. Volunteers repair the bikes and teach others how.
The school encourages biking and has regular training for the annual school triathlon in summer, for which kids need their bikes. There can be 200 to 300 of them on good days.
The Greater Wellington Regional Council’s Pedal Ready programme offers cycling instruction to every student each year. ‘‘It also means more kids walking and biking, which has to be good for keeping safer in a crowd,’’ Jaquiery says. ‘‘We live in a low-ish decile area. We have a fantastic principal. And the kids are noticeably fitter.’’
3 SAFE HOUSES
Jane Hansen’s daughters grew up in nearby Whitby. Locals set up a neighbourhood watch system to help get the girls walking safely to and from school. Residents would go to their gates to check no cars or strangers were trawling the area before or after school travel times. The kids knew the safe houses and could ask for help if needed. Up in Auckland, Zelda Wynn says that as a retiree she would be happy to keep an eye out on her street for a short time each day if she lived roadside. She let her son walk home from school after discussing the dangers. Green Bay to New Lynn. But it only happened once after he was chased by older children trying to steal his sneakers.
4 PORTABLE ALARMS
Hannah Milward is a nurse from Wellington who helped make a little smartphone app called Verisafe. With the press of a button, children can notify their parents they are in trouble. It’ll instantly email, text or call their designated contact person with their details and GPS position. Parents can even set up a regular check-up message. Contacts are only alerted if a recipient does not confirm their safety by clicking on the link within the automated text message.
Milward hoping for donations of smartphones which can be distributed to families who can’t afford them.
And in Hamilton, Maria Johnston founded Clevercare in 2014. The company has come up with a next-generation watch that can be called like a cellphone, and send real-time location updates. The watch can be linked to a 24-7 emergency call centre.
5 SAFER ROADS
At her home along the Kapiti Coast, Michelle Lewis has two children, one in year 8 and one in year 9. They’ve walked or biked to school almost every day since kindergarten. They live about 1.5km from their school and the journey involves crossing several side roads and two tricky intersections. A zebra crossing has been put in at one of those.
‘‘Until the crossing went in, about 200 metres from the school, my children were accompanied to the tricky intersection. When they were in years 3 and 4, they wanted to go alone so we let them go and followed at a distance for several weeks during the first term. That seems young, however my kids wanted to go together and wanted to walk or cycle. They came up with games as they went.’’
Way back in 1992, Awapuni School in Gisborne wanted a pedestrian bridge to cross Waikanae Creek. The school sits near a busy logging truck route and safety was a growing concern as the school’s role grew from 114 pupils to 450. So, with help from the NZ Transport Authority, the district council built the Alfred Cox cycle and walkway in 2013, with a bridge over the creek so the children can take a safer route. It also helped reduce congestion along Awapuni Rd.
6 LET KIDS BE KIDS
Living in Rotorua, Heather McKenzie was going to let her daughter walk to school after she turned six on July 3, 1987. On June 19 of that year, Teresa Cormack also turned six and the next day she headed off to school but never turned up. She was sexually assaulted and murdered.
‘‘I shouldn’t have been intimidated by it, but I was,’’ McKenzie recalls.
‘‘The news reports at the time thought maybe she wanted to go home and play with her new toys, and I thought that could’ve been my daughter. It was her birthday. So I continued to drop my daughter off at school on my way to work.
‘‘If I had known about walking buses I would have got a group of parents together to maybe have one day a week each to walk our children to school.’’
AUT University research revealed that fewer than half of Kiwi kids aged 8 to 12 are allowed to travel alone in their neighbourhood, and barely five per cent do so often. Parents believed there was a 73.2 per cent likelihood the child would be involved in a road accident, and a 60 per cent likelihood they would come across an ill-intentioned adult.
As the perceived risks contrast with reality, opportunities that would otherwise be beneficial to children’s development disappear.
Sergeant Geoff Blake of Hutt Valley Police Youth Services says parents should be teaching behaviour danger rather than stranger danger because offenders are more likely than not to know the child.
There may be times when a child needs to approach adults they don’t know for help – for example, if they’re lost. There’s also a risk they will not be able to recognise abuse from someone they know and trust, if they have only been taught about it in the context of someone they don’t know.
‘‘If you teach them that abuse only happens from people they don’t know, they will not recognise it when it is done by a known and often trusted person,’’ Blake says. ‘‘It’s far better to give children practice in identifying situations that could be dangerous and to talk about things they could do to stay safe.’’