Making Kids Count ( breakout presentation )

Abstract

Organizations across Canada are developing new strategies to collect and use data about school travel patterns and attitudes, which will improve the abilities of communities to identify and overcome barriers to active school travel. HASTe has evolved the standard Canadian School Travel Planning (STP) survey toolkit to help practitioners find meaningful correlations in transportation data and gain more insights into barriers to active and safe trips to school, and opportunities to overcome them. Our presentation will focus on 3 new methods currently in use in BC: The first is these development is in mapping. Employing the standard Canadian STP toolkit and open source GIS software, HASTe uses baseline survey data to create heat and cluster maps to help STP communities prioritize interventions and infrastructure investments. The second is the refinement of the survey tools. HASTe has evolved the standard Canadian STP take-home survey and data entry templates to automatically correlate independent elementary of the survey data set. The new template produces useful and presentable survey results for STP communities to help them better understand their schools’ transportation activities and barriers. The third is the development of a qualitative data coding system. HASTe has developed a simple template and method to allow STP communities to sort and code qualitative survey data, helping them turn input from the school community into actionable information that can inform the school travel planning and implementation process. This presentation will be of use to anyone looking to support and encourage more active school travel. HASTe has used freeware spreadsheet and GIS software to evolve tools available through a publicly available toolkit; the tools and methods are easily accessible and replicable by practitioners and community members.