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Creating a city where kids can safely walk, bike to school
MEL MARGINET
IF there’s one thing that all Winnipeggers can agree on, other than potholes, it’s the chaos of getting kids to and from school. The frustration extends to households without children who live a short distance to local schools and must deal with traffic jams twice a day.
Coun. Markus Chambers brought the fury of his ward residents into the public eye in early January when he made the first moves on a “stopdrop- go” motion to limit parking to one minute in designated school zones.
How did we get here? Local news outlets asked on their social media for stories from Winnipeggers about their school travel experiences. Comments flowed in about childhoods spent walking and biking to school with friends, and how that has been replaced with door-to-door drives. Meanwhile, MPI reported in October that 36 kids were hit by drivers in the last year. So what changed in the last few decades?
First, there are far more vehicles on our roads, and those vehicles are much bigger and heavier than cars of the past.
Second, we’ve allowed our municipalities to essentially engineer a meaningful walk out of the lives of the majority of people, with residential neighbourhoods spread out further and further from facilities.
Finally, we have few, if any, municipal policies to discourage the door-to-door school drop. Instead, parents who do encourage their kids to walk or bike to school share stories of social norms that make them feel like bad parents for allowing their kids to partake in the “risky” activity of biking or walking to school.
Honestly, if we’ve created neighbourhoods where independent, active travel to and from school is likened to childhood endangerment, we truly have lost our way.
How do we fix this? While the councillor’s motion to limit drop offs to one minute is well-intentioned, it is a Band-Aid, not a solution. It treats the symptom while offering no cure. This strategy does nothing to reduce traffic levels — it would actually add more stress (assuming there’s even a way to meaningfully enforce this rule).
However, there are time-tested solutions to encourage active and safer travel to school that we can and should implement. There is no single magic action that city staff can undertake; rather, we need to do a lot of little things better all at once.
Here are a few places we can start.
Speed. We can’t force vehicle manufacturers to make vehicles with fewer blind spots and less weight. In fact, this problem is only going to get worse as we see more electric vehicles, which are much heavier. If you can’t control the size or the weight of the vehicle, what can the municipality control?
The speed. Fifty km/h kills, 30 km/h means those involved in a collision will likely walk away. That’s not an opinion, that’s physics. Winnipeg has had a “safe speed” report in the works for close to two years now, and it’s time we see the results and start calming our residential streets.
Design. This follows on the heels of speed. Wide, straight roads encourage speeding. Narrow roads around schools would provide the mental cues to drivers to slow down. This can be quickly implemented and tested with some planters or other fun designs. City councillors could work with schools in their wards to apply this before the end of the school year.
Connection. If children can’t get from their homes to their school without having to interact with traffic, how do we expect the adults in their lives to feel safe letting them get to school independently? Whether it’s missing sidewalks or lack of protected bike lanes, we need to close these gaps. This also doesn’t have to be expensive, again using the idea of planters to create space on the road for bikes.
Moving forward, new developments should include a strong focus on design that encourages residents to easily and safely walk or bike to common destinations in their neighbourhood, such as schools. And no, being able to walk around a retention pond is not walkability. More vibrant and active communities translate into more people and more “eyes on the street,” which helps to address the “stranger danger” fears.
Health. We need to get serious about creating safe neighbourhoods for our kids to walk and bike in for more urgent reasons other than solving traffic chaos. With more driving and less walking, we know that kids are no longer getting the recommended activity they need each day. The sad reality is the amount of physical movement they need is often equivalent to the amount of time it would take for most kids to walk to school. Whether it’s asthma, anxiety, obesity, air quality or the myriad of issues that result from a sedentary lifestyle, we can solve many of them by ensuring that walking to school, the community centre, the grocery store and the park is possible in our neighbourhoods.
As children age into tweens and teens, the need for independence grows. Having to rely on rides to access activities, first jobs or just hanging out with friends creates unnecessary stress on families. Parents are forced to do the driving or plan the rides, and the kids lose out on the opportunity to be more independent.
Who has the happiest kids in the world? The Dutch. Kids in the Netherlands have the freedom of movement kids in our city can only dream of. It hasn’t always been this way.
In the 1970s, death and injury to children was on the rise in the car-clogged country and parents had enough. A “Stop de Kindermoord” (Stop Murdering Children) campaign was launched.
This coincided with the government looking at their balance sheets and realizing the infrastructure needed to move most people by vehicle was going to bankrupt them. Change wasn’t easy, but 40 years later they are enjoying the fruits of coming through a frustrating time focused on changing their transportation system for the better. They have made many, many (many) changes, big and small, to get to the top of the 2025 UNICEF Report for happy kids.
This is probably the point in the article where you might be thinking “well, but winter ...”
I encourage us to stop using winter as a reason for dallying on strategies to move conveniently and safely without a personal vehicle. Plenty of winter cities around the world have found a way.
In Oulu, Finland, thousands of kids bike to school in the depths of winter. Montreal has also made great leaps to tackle their ice and snow. Let’s move on from this excuse.
It’s time for us adults to do the work and give kids in Winnipeg the chance to move freely, safely and happily here, too.
Mel Marginet is part of the sustainable transportation team at Green Action Centre and she’s the publisher at Great Plains Press, which publishes The City Project.