Walk to school, save the planet

That’s the goal these days in Lecco, Italy. Along with combating childhood obesity. It’s a simple idea, really – children who live within a reasonable distance of school should walk there on most days. The children get much needed exercise, the town cuts down on some traffic jams, and the planet gets a very tiny respite from pollution. O.K., so they’re not really saving the planet, but they’re certainly doing their part, and if this could be replicated in town after town in multiple countries then maybe a dent could actually be made in auto emissions. In the meantime, the added exercise and reduced traffic are no small matters for the townspeople of Lecco. The NY Times has the report:

Each morning, about 450 students travel along 17 school bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this lakeside city at the southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school buses.

In 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local traffic jams and — most important — a rise in global greenhouse gases abetted by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a retro-radical concept: children should walk to school. They set up a piedbus (literally foot-bus in Italian) — a bus route with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a mix of paid staff members and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests lead lines of walking students along Lecco’s twisting streets to the schools’ gates, Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands.

At the Carducci School, 100 children, or more than half of the students, now take walking buses. Many of them were previously driven in cars…Although the routes are each generally less than a mile, the town’s piedibuses have so far eliminated more than 100,000 miles of car travel and, in principle, prevented thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the air, Dario Pesenti, the town’s environment auditor, estimates.

The number of children who are driven to school over all is rising in the United States and Europe, experts on both continents say, making up a sizable chunk of transportation’s contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions. The “school run” made up 18 percent of car trips by urban residents of Britain last year, a national survey showed.

Related posts:

1. A suburb without cars. Can it work? ...
2. America’s most walkable neighborhoods ...
3. Things we take for granted ...