Healthy Travel, Healthy Environments: Integrating Youth and Child Perspectives into Municipal Transportation Planning

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments 15(2), 2005 Healthy Travel, Healthy Environments: Integrating Youth and Child Perspectives into Municipal Transportation Planning Susan Wurtele Trent University Peterborough, Ontario, Canada Jill Ritchie Peterborough County-City Health Unit Peterborough, Ontario, Canada Citation: Wurtele, Susan and Jill Ritchie. (2005). “Healthy Travel, Healthy Environments: Integrating Youth and Child Perspectives into Local Municipal Transportation Planning.” Children, Youth and Environments 15(2): 356-370. . Comment on This Article Abstract Active and Safe Routes to School (ASRTS) is a national program to increase active travel by children on the home-school journey and thereby to improve health, traffic safety, air quality and community connections. Peterborough’s ASRTS Research Project (situated in Ontario, Canada) is an innovative partnership linking a public health department, an environmental non-profit organization and an academic geographer to conduct school-community transportation studies. The research project described here involved transportation studies carried out at ten schools by geography students in co-operation with parents and schools. The results were shared with school councils, school boards, community organizations and municipal transportation planners. The project offered university students an opportunity for community-based research while increasing the capacity of the partner organizations. The school transportation studies provided local data that promoted consideration of child transportation issues in the City’s Transportation Master Plan Update (2002). This paper examines the evolution, contributions, and challenges of the ASRTS partnership and how it could expand and attract allies such as urban planners. Keywords: urban planning, community-based research, schools, transportation, Active and Safe Routes to School (ASRTS)© 2005 Children, Youth and Environments Healthy Travel, Healthy Environments: Integrating Youth and Child Perspectives… 357 Introduction Local governance has daily and pervasive impacts on the lives of children and youth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in local transportation planning. In this paper we reflect on a project that enabled the education, health, and environmental sectors to develop a more child-centered perspective. In particular, this project involved school councils, the local public health unit and an environmental nonprofit organization.1 The services provided by these groups regularly focus on children and youth but by coming together in a partnership to study children’s travel patterns, the initiative was broadened and strengthened. In its data collection phase, the partnership was extended to include youth from the local university as researchers. Based on the breadth and depth of the project that emerged, it was also possible to provide input into a concurrent municipal transportation planning exercise. As such, this project provides a useful model for collecting local-level, child- and youth-centered information to put forward to municipal service agencies and planning officials. Every day millions of Canadian children make the trip to and from school. Some of them will walk with a sibling or ride their bike with friends. While two-thirds of them live within a 30-minute walk of their school (Green Communities Association 2004), over 21 percent travel passively, sitting in a vehicle (Hunt 1998). In addition to the adverse effects on health resulting from low levels of physical activity, this pattern leads to traffic congestion and poor air quality around many schools and in this way becomes an environmental and municipal planning issue. Concerns about the impacts of this situation upon the well-being of children have led to the implementation of programs promoting active travel in communities across the country.2 This report reviews the Active and Safe Routes to School (ASRTS)-Peterborough Research Project which took place between January 2000 and April 2002. During this time a community-based coalition collaborated with local university students to initiate a school-based active travel program in Peterborough, Ontario. This innovative partnership brought university student researchers into the elementary school setting and injected their own perspectives into the municipal Transportation Master Plan review process. The university students’ role was to collect data on the travel patterns of specific school communities. This was the first step in introducing the ASRTS program and ensuring that it was tailored to the needs of each school. The purposes of this report are to document the unique features of the partnership, to tell the story of the project, and to examine the role it played...