Throughout the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year, the Watch the Road team has been meeting with schools to get a better sense of their traffic issues and concerns they have. In order to do this, our staff has been attending parent meetings to discuss the program, and find out specific issues with each school. At every meeting, each parent is given the opportunity to fill out a survey with some questions regarding transportation to and from school. We are interested to see how many students are walking and biking to school, along with parents concerns as to why or why not they would allow their children to walk and bike.

In the months of October and November, we attended parent meetings and events at six different schools and collected over 200 surveys. We found out that the majority of students (73%) live within 2 miles of the schools they attend and as a result most of them choose to walk to school everyday (59%), and about 75% of parents say that their kids walk to school at least a few times during the week. This is a great number of students walking as this leads to less congestion in the mornings and afternoons outside of the school, and is helping to keep students healthy.

We were also able to see that although over half of parents say their child owns a bike, only 5% say that they use it to ride to school. The main reasons for this are due to parent concerns with unsafe drivers in the neighborhoods, and the student’s lack of safety equipment and education for bicycling. It is the Watch the Road programs goal to try and increase the number of students riding their bikes by teaching them how to ride safe, and encouraging them by informing them of the benefits that come with riding a bike.

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