Walking Buses - Providing Safe Routes to School
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA 
on 04.22.07
Strangely, we don’t appear to have covered ‘walking buses’ yet. No, they are not Fred Flintstone-style mass transit, but a neat, safe way for kids to get to school. They originate in the UK and, according to walkingbus.com they are “the nearest activity to perfect exercise.” Essentially, each walking bus has an adult 'driver' at the front and and an adult 'conductor' at the back. The ‘bus’ runs along a specific route picking up 'passengers' at specific 'bus-stops' along the way. The bus runs “rain or shine and everyone wears a reflective jacket. Along the way children can chat to their friends, learn valuable road safety skills and gain some independence.” Seems to us like the perfect way to beat childhood obesity, increase road safety awareness, reduce oil dependence, combat climate change, and create friendlier, healthier, safer communities. We love it! Apparently, after a walking bus was introduced at one UK school, the rate of kids walking to school shot up from 48% to 75%. Hopefully these kids will retain their enthusiasm for self-propelled transport long after they outgrow the 'bus'.
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I believe that David Engwicht, of Street Reclaiming fame came up with the walking school bus idea. He's a wonderful character, and has lots of great ideas for keeping neighborhoods safe and healthy. He's got another book out now, called Mental Speed Bumps that should be on every urban and traffic planner's desk.
The Walking School Bus is also a big component of many Safe Routes to School programs all over the world.
Check out the work of Safe Routes to School and walkboston.org
Rosa Parks Elementary in Woodinville, WA has a 'walking bus' program. In fact, the (brand-new) school has no actual busses at all and only offers the walking option. I think they may have a couple busses for field trips, and that's it. The surrounding community loves it, although I'm not sure how large the district is.
My sister who teaches at the Welsh school in Abergele, Wales is a part of the walking bus programme, or "bws cerdded". Many parents also like tagging along with the walk aswell as their children.
You could also say that in encourages parents to do more walkign themselves. Should cut down on obesity statistics.
Great idea, one other benifit of the parents walking is they meet the other parents and this could lead to discussions that improve the schools and the community.
I don't know about this idea...I'm sure it sounds great to everybody that already has kids, but for those of us who are young enough to remember being kids it's not so hot. Does anyone actually think kids are going to want to wear stupid little day-glow vests like this?
I'd like to see a world more like the one I grew up in, where parents trust kids to handle their own business. I used to walk miles to school, unsupervised with only my friend Pablo to watch my back. We had to walk through a flood control system, uninhabited desert and a mild gang land to get to our middle school (and later through absolutely the worst part of town to get to high school).
Our parents were cool with this because they had raised us right, and knew that it was important for us to handle our own lives and our own well being. I hate overprotective parents.
Walking school buses are sort of an intermediary step to having kids walk on their own. They're most popular for K-1-2-3. Kids' brains aren't developed enough to process traffic before age 8-9, so it's very appropriate that they start walking on their own around 4th or 5th grade. BUT the ideal is still to work toward`a world where kids can walk to school on their own, and parents teach incremental traffic safety skills -- and then, as the previous commenter says, let kids learn to deal with life in the real world. Street savvy, one might say.