School Travel Plans
Making it safer and easier for children to walk, cycle or catch public transport to school has long-term health benefits, reduces air pollution and traffic congestion, and helps children arrive at school awake, refreshed and ready to learn.
Because of the many benefits, local councils in the UK, Australia and New Zealand are actively involved in helping schools to develop and implement travel plans. In Canada, a national pilot project running from 2010-2012 is designed to bring stakeholders together to build school travel plans collaboratively. Typical actions in a school travel plan include promoting the health benefits of walking, providing more or better pedestrian crossings, tighter enforcement of parking and traffic rules around the school, providing cycle training, and setting up a walking school bus. School travel planning groups like Green Communities Canada also work on a policy level to encourage multi-tiered governmental policies that support active travel.
Read more about this topic: Travel Plan
Famous quotes containing the words school, travel and/or plans:
“... the school should be an appendage of the family state, and modeled on its primary principle, which is, to train the ignorant and weak by self-sacrificing labor and love; and to bestow the most on the weakest, the most undeveloped, and the most sinful.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man’s life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In order to become spoiled ... a child has to be able to want things as well as need them. He has to be able to see himself as a being who is separate from everyone else.... A baby is none of these things. He feels a need and he expresses it. He is not intellectually capable of working out involved plans and ideas like “Can I make her give me...?” “If I make enough fuss he will...?” “They let me do ... yesterday and I want to do it again today so I’ll....””
—Penelope Leach (20th century)