Piedibus - Parent’s self organization for the children school pedestrian mobility
Best Practice
Topics
Mobility
Short description
Piedibus is a ‘walking bus’: it consists in a line of children going to school in a group and escorted by two adults, a “driver” in front and a “conductor” at the back. The Piedibus starts from a “terminus” and, following an established route, picks up children at the various “stops” along the way, keeping to the set timetable. On the way children chatter with their friends, learn useful things regarding road safety and earn themselves a little independence.
Project executive
The Piedibus can be organised in any school where parents are willing to take part in the project. The web site has been up and running since April 2005, and is the fruit of a project devised and developed in the summer of 2003 by the parents of the children attending the Ricci Curbastro primary school. The first Piedibus took off in Padua in January 2004.
Participants
The project can be promoted by a local body (health concern, NGOs, schools) with or without the support of technical and/or organisational consultants. For the project to work, the children’s parents must be actively involved and guarantee their presence as chaperones along the pre-established routes.
Objectives
Promoting getting to school and back on foot is a way of making the city more liveable, less polluted and less dangerous.
Obesity in children is increasing at an alarming rate. Lazy and overweight, they don’t walk much, while paediatricians maintain that half an hour walking a day during the growing phase is enough to keep the body in shape and helps prevent many serious chronic diseases.
Walking to school is also a way of socialising, of making new friends and of getting to school all toned up and in a good mood to start the day’s lessons. Road behaviour is learnt hands-on and this helps children grow into conscientious pedestrians.
Activities
The site www.piedibus.it offers everything you need to know about the project: general information, a detailed account of the projects which have been set up in various Italian cities, the programme with the different development stages, the necessary documents. The individual activities are planned and activated at a local level.
Process
1) Obtain the school headmaster’s collaboration. During the planning phase of the project involve and sensitise parents and teachers.
2) Contact families and schedule meetings to determine how many parents would be willing to take part in the project, how many children would be interested in making use of this service, and to determine what part of the area they come from.
3) Trace out the most suitable itinerary and decide on where to place the stops;
4) Check out the entire itinerary by walking it “at a child’s pace” and seeing how long it would take. Decide the time at which the ‘walking bus’ should leave from the terminus and reach each stop so as to get to school on time.
5) Draw up the weekly accompaniment timetable with the parents willing to take part in the project and fix, for every day of the week, whose turn it is to accompany the children, and who is on the emergency service list.
6) Promote the project through various means of communication.
Results
After this first experience in Padua, and thanks to the web site which helped spread the know-how, the project took off in various cities in Italy. In fact, over the past two years, various schools in different cities have set up this project with encouraging results both in terms of sensitising and education, and in terms of reducing the amount of cars near and around schools. It has been estimated, for example, that during the 2004/2005 school year in Padua, the Piedibus set up by the Ricci School covered about 300 Km, and took off the roads an average of 15 cars a day from the congestion that builds up in front of the school and in the surrounding streets at school opening and closing hours.
Evaluation
Each piedibus project is evaluated by the people who organise and implement it, whereas the web site is evaluated through an in-depth statistics analysis on the number of visitors acceding to the site, and the level of its popularity.
Difficulties
Difficulties may arise from parents or headmasters having little or no interest in the project, or being either diffident or anxious about it. Because of the voluntary nature of this initiative, it is often difficult to find parents who are willing to give their time to organising and managing the chaperoning.
Budget
see below (Euro)
Financial backer
The cost of the web site was entirely covered by those who devised and set it up.The costs include printing documentation, purchasing suitable bibs, possibly covering the escorts with an insurance policy and, naturally, the time given by the parents towards organising the service and escorting the children.