Healthy Travel, Healthy Environments

Integrating Youth and Child Perspectives into Municipal Transportation Planning

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.