We’re Already Moving
In my last post, I wrote about the potential benefits of encouraging a critical mass of kids to use active transportation to get to school. In this post, I’ll explore some ideas for how we might bring this vision to light.
First a disclaimer— I’m a newcomer to this conversation. I only started caring when I began biking with my daughter to school. It’s important to acknowledge that several folks in our community have already been working on this project. We have an excellent bike path thanks to the work of many residents, advocates, and local government leaders. The Fairhaven Bikeway Committee has organized bike buses in the past and ensures that the town continues to prioritize active transportation. Many people have already started moving the needle on this, and any efforts I propose here are intended to be in concert and collaboration with all of these groups and individuals.
The Challenge
It’s useful to start by defining what we already know about the gap we’re trying to bridge. For the time being, I’m going to focus on my own kid’s school, Leroy Wood. Currently, at Wood, only a handful of kids bike, and another handful of kids walk with a parent. Probably about 6/400 or 1.5% of the school population. When the weather was nicer in the fall, we had maybe twice that amount, so maybe 3% at our peak.
What would it look like to significantly increase active transportation? Given our starting point of near zero, I’d posit that for Wood School an increase to 25% of kids regularly walking or biking to school by the end of the next school year would represent wild success. Sure it’s not Dutch good, but I think it would be enough that we’d see a lot of the positive benefits I mentioned in the last post. That’s about 100 kids coming to school each day throughout the neighborhoods served by Wood, enlivening the streets and having a good time. It’s also another 50+ cars out of the pickup line and off the roads during the morning commute (assuming that kids who bike will be a combo of current car riders and bus riders). We’d need a bigger bike rack. My guess is that if we got to 100 kids, we might see a tipping point, where active transportation was seen as normal (again). I think that this kind of critical mass would also bring about enough safety in numbers to pull a lot of currently out-of-reach parents into the tent.
How do we get to 100 riders at Wood?
We ride our bikes, of course!
Here’s the part where I’m going to part ways with many of my colleagues and friends who work in nonprofits and government: I propose that we don’t start by doing a multi-year study, creating a long-term strategic plan, or doing extensive backward planning. My experience is that these kinds of exercises have little bearing on reality when faced with complex systems. Any document or detailed plan we create now will be outdated within a few weeks of our rolling up our sleeves.
My preference instead is that we use an iterative process in which we make a lot of small bets, pay attention to the results, and then respond based on the feedback we get from reality. When you ride a bike (or drive a car for that matter) you don’t reach your destination by making a few big moves— you’re constantly adjusting your steering, shifting your weight, and immediately responding to the feedback you get from your surroundings. The shorter the feedback loop, the faster we learn, course-correct and reach our destination.
In practice, that means that a group of us will have to check in regularly, share what we’re seeing and learning, and plan our next steps. Short meetings with short intervals between them.
Where do we start?
We start with our current riders and walkers!
I recently attended a training about bike lane advocacy with Strong Towns. Here’s their suggested strategy:
Using the Strong Towns template as a starting point, our job is to seek out our current riders and walkers and figure out how we can make their journey easier and safer.
One current rider I know is a 5th grader who lives around the corner from us. He biked to school with a group of friends until winter. Why’d they stop? Darker days? The cold? Ice on the bike path? Maybe we can help him and some of his friends to keep biking through the seasons (or start back in early Spring). We try some stuff, (provide lights, clothing recs, hand warmers for cold days?) and see what works. Wash, rinse repeat.
In addition to working with current riders, there are lots of things we can try, including coordinating with the school, resurrecting some version of the bike bus, partnering with bike shops, and employing some tactical urbanism to make the route to school safer. We can’t always predict what will be productive, but we can make some small bets to see what gets people riding.
Cause for Optimism: We’ve Got Good Bones
This post from Safe Routes to School gives us some clues about where we might test some ideas. According to a 2005 CDC study and follow-up by SRTS, here are the barriers that parents cite to allowing kids to walk or bike to school:
The good news is that we’re in a good position to mitigate these concerns here in the haven. Here’s a quick breakdown of how each of the above barriers might apply to Fairhaven.
Distance
Despite the closure of two neighborhood schools within our downtowns, (Rogers in the Center and Oxford in North Fairhaven), most schools in the town are within biking distance for the vast majority of families. According to Google, it’s faster to bike (at least for an adult) to Wood School than to drive, thanks to the direct route provided by the bike path.
Traffic-related Danger
The bike path mitigates a lot of traffic-related danger for much of the route to Wood. Likewise, the design of our streets (notwithstanding Rte 6 and its relatives) and the relative density of our primary residential areas do a lot to slow traffic during school drop-off and dismissal times, at least compared to other towns of similar size that are more spread out.
Weather
Weather is not much different than it was in the 60s when half of the kids biked or walked to school. Once you start to venture out of the car more regularly, you realize most days aren’t so bad, especially if you’re equipped. My daughter and I haven’t missed a day due to the weather (full disclosure she had strep on the day of the last polar vortex). Perhaps we can distribute some cleverkid rain capes to our riders : )
Crime Danger
Despite the increase of fear caused by availability bias, crime rates in Fairhaven are about half of what they were 15 years ago. Furthermore, my guess is that what crime is happening is far less likely to occur in public spaces in broad daylight during the morning and afternoon commutes.
Opposing School Policy
From my experience, the schools have been supportive of active transportation. They allow kids to bike and independently walk to/from school starting in Grade 3. Previous Wood School administrations have supported the Bike Bus and other efforts and I have no reason they’d oppose more kids experiencing a healthy commute.
Who is “We”?
Hopefully some of you! If you live in the ‘haven and you want to support more active transportation to school, click here to sign up and we’ll get together soon.
I also want to plug the Fairhaven Bikeways Committee! Even if you’re just a casual rider (or pedestrian) like me, Bikeways Committee is a great place to join the effort for a stronger haven. We meet monthly and you can apply online.
I’m eager to get going-- coffee’s on me if you’re crazy enough to sign up.
While Stronghaven won’t be exclusively focused on this 100 Riders effort, I hope I’ll be able to share some of our progress and lessons learned here.
For the Comments:
Fairhaven parents, what’s keeping you from sending your kids to school via bike or foot?