(Edit 3/2.11.2005)

Maria-Goeppert- Mayer Guest Professor Inaugural Lecture,
Technical University of Braunschweig:

The walking bus: the gender implications.

November 3^rd, 2005

Image courtesy of Sarah Marshall @ http://www.thewalkingbus.co.uk

 

Professor Margaret Grieco, D.Phil.(Oxon.),  Professor of Transport and Society,

Napier University, Edinburgh

Click here for German text

Introduction:

 

I have great pleasure in delivering here today at the Technical University of Braunschweig my inaugural lecture as  Maria-Goeppert- Mayer Guest Professor.  It is an honour, indeed.  The specialist field of my guest professorship is Gender and Transport and I am already engaged at  TU-BS in running two seminar series and delivering a course on this very important but all too frequently neglected topic (http://www.geocities.com/gender_and_transport ).  In thinking about this inaugural, I wanted to focus on a topic which, whilst still in the expert field of gender and transport, has an  immediate and do_able action dimension for us all.  This lecture is aimed at opening up the prospect of transport education for civil society and has the goal of creating greater interest, involvement and participation of the public in transport planning and other contemporary planning processes.

 

In particular, this inaugural lecture is about change in the field of gender and transport; it is about citizen participation in transport planning and transport provision in an increasingly environment-conscious civil world where the requirement to share resources and share burdens more equitably is a visible policy concern. 

 

Historically, women have been disadvantaged in respect of their opportunities for mobility and in their access to services and health and wealth.  Gender sensitive governance in respect of transport policy issues is becoming a concern within the German speaking world: the studies of Daniela Jauk and colleagues in Graz (Hartl and  Jauk, 2006) investigate explicitly the transport needs and transport desires of women both in terms of the provision of services and their entitlement to participate in governance.  And research has begun to be commissioned by the European central institutions in this field too: recently the European Parliament has begun a process of restricted tenders for research into women and transport which touches these topics. And research institutes have begun to apply for monies on gender and transport under European science funding: such a bid is presently being developed by colleagues in Denmark.  The Technical University of Braunschweig with the Maria Goeppert Mayer Guest Professorship is playing its part in a general movement towards the better scientific understanding  of and the better civic practice around gender and transport.

 

So academics and policy institutions have begun their engagement with gender and transport and changes are likely to result which better meet the needs and wants of Europe's women in their respective member states  but there are aspects of a gender and transport agenda which can be engaged with directly by citizens and can be initiated now.  One such innovation is the walking bus: before describing the walking bus and what it may mean for women, I want to stress that in this lecture I will look at both the positive sides and the downside of the walking bus.  My belief is that there are modifications that need to be made to enable the walking bus to be a completely positive gender intervention.  I believe these modifications can be made and should be made but let us now explore the arguments for and against the walking bus together.

 

What is the walking bus?

The walking bus is a pedestrian group escort of children from their homes to school and back. It relieves individual mothers of making these escort journeys every day and is designed to cut down on automobile use and enhance the exercise regime of young children.  The walking bus has been adopted in many locations in the UK, the USA, Switzerland (Pedibus), Australia and New Zealand.  This lecture will examine the development of the walking bus and its implications for gender in respect of travel and transport. It will explore the opportunities for the use of the walking bus within Germany: in different European countries both infrastructures and social arrangements are differently configured.  The consequence of these infrastructural and social differences means that the precise arrangements around walking buses will vary from country to country and from member state to member state.  What works in Britain can not simply be lifted off the shelf and applied to Germany although what works in Britain may indeed be a relevant starting point from which to start shaping German walking bus protocols, practices, equipment and start up packages.

 

The walking bus is an Australian  invention[1] but  is actively promoted by British governmental agencies at both the central and local levels and is dependent on parent volunteers to 'drive' the bus and act as 'conductor/s'. The children walk together in pairs, they are organised one pair behind another with adults at the front, the back and at roadside boundary of this human 'crocodile', the children wear reflective vests or other reflective markers on their persons.  The walking bus calls at the house of each child in the group or at set pick up points in an organised routing as it makes its way between the childrens' neighbourhood and the school.    It has the advantage that the children are able to walk to school without the prospect of 'stranger danger' and this frees mothers from either walking their own children to school every morning, or, more importantly, for many purposes more related to the preservation of the environment than the saving of women's time,  from driving their children to school.  The walking bus does generally require that children live within walking distance of the school but it is also possible to organise walking buses within neighbourhoods to service school bus pick up points which then shuttle children to school where these distances are outside of children's walking capabilities.

 

The walking bus we can already see has potential gender benefits: it can allow women to increase their personal time (where previously they made the walking journey every day) and enables them to directly participate in the planning of their childrens' mobility.  The 'walking bus movement' in Britain has received substantial support from British governmental agencies at the level of advocacy and information provision and now has a well developed support structure with parent groups wishing to set up walking buses able to obtain 'walking bus kits' which contain information on how to plan a walking bus, the equipment needed to run the walking bus such as reflective vests and information on how effectively these services have been adopted and provided by communities elsewhere (http://www.kentwalkingbus.org/) .         

 

Walking buses are organised in conjunction with the head teacher of the schools that they serve and can be covered by insurance provisions.  Governmental support, both local and central, of the walking bus social movement  has meant that institutional issues such as insurance have received attention.  The risk assessment culture of contemporary Britain  results in issues such as insurance receiving close consideration and this is visible in the walking bus literature   (http://www.kentwalkingbus.org/).  The primarily volunteer character of the walking bus requires specific insurance as those 'staffing' it are not local authority employees although many local government organisations have extended their schemes so as to provide insurance cover for volunteers.

 

This may be happening in Britain but what has the walking bus got to do with Germany.  Before moving to answer that question let us just stop and notice that what we have in the British government's active advocacy of the walking bus is a youth transport strategy:  the policy concerns about damage to the environment, the intensification of urban congestion and the rising levels of obesity and their impact on health are resulting in strategies designed to educate youth towards healthier and more environmentally friendly options than those presently in position.  These are youth transport strategies and the literature on youth and transport is indeed growing. To return to our question what has this got to do with Germany?  Well, the walking bus has arrived in Germany[2]: Bremen and Paderborn have both started to experiment with the walking bus.  Paderborn has focused on the health benefits of children walking to school as opposed to being driven there in automobiles by their parents ( see http://www.paderborn.de/microsite/walking_bus ): its banner headline for the walking bus  is  'The obesity time bomb: the walking bus ' a preventive measure.'  It is clearly time to begin an evaluation of what the walking bus offers and what modifications may be necessary to our social and infrastructural environment to make it successful whether that be in Britain or in Germany. 

 

The positive contributions of the walking bus

There are four important areas of discussion in terms of the positive contributions of the walking bus which regularly appear in the literature:

        Environmental sustainability discourse: reduced emissions.

        Urban sustainability: reduce congestion.

        Health sustainability: reduce obesity.

        Travel behaviour education: early socialisation into walking sustains all three other objectives.

Environmental sustainability discourse: reduced emissions.

Policy makers' focus and concerns have fallen upon the 'school run': the school run is a term used  to denote mothers driving their children to school and dropping them off at the school gate in the morning and returning to the school gate in the car to pick them up in the afternoon.  The morning run coincides with other peak hour traffic and contributes towards morning congestion and grid lock.  Apart from contributing towards congestion, the vehicles that compose the school run create local congestion and parking problems in the neighbourhoods where schools are located.  The school run has increasingly come to be viewed as an environmental nuisance to the locality.  And funds are being made available for schools to develop travel plans which reduce the dependence on or eliminate the school run: schools have thus become a front line in the British Government's demand management strategies to reduce congestion and, as a consequence, reduce emissions (see Box 1.). 

 

 

 

This central government initiative aimed at removing the school run has generated resources for local authorities and individual schools in developing walking as part of their school travel plans.

 

 

At different points in time and in different documents, different negative aspects of the school run are emphasised but the concerns about the environment figure very frequently. The links between the school run, congestion and the environmental damage of motorised traffic are repeatedly made in the promotion and advocacy of the walking bus.

 

Urban sustainability: reduce congestion.

As we have already seen environment sustainability, the reduction of emissions, and urban sustainability - the reduction of congestion and local neighbour nuisance - are very much linked.  By focusing on the reduced use of the car in travel to school, both goals appear to be met.  But the walking bus is not the only strategy that can be used: the prospect of cycle buses (groups of children cycling under supervision) or the use of partway schemes which deliver children to a point  of lesser congestion than the school gates and organise their walking journey for the rest of the way can also be used.  Shared car schemes to deliver children to school presently operate separately from the walking bus but  could be organised to work with the walking bus providing a more flexible arrangement for situations of extreme weather conditions or out  of normal hours journeys back home after school clubs, etc.

 

Health sustainability: reduce obesity.

One of the strongest logics presented for the walking bus is the impact that walking in childhood can have on short and long term wellbeing. Walking is seen by the governmental and health policy agencies as a mechanism for reducing childhood obesity in a context where childhood obesity levels are dramatically increasing.  The walking bus clearly fits into this  health policy framework, however, in the British context,  it is frequently pointed out that at the same time as childhood obesity levels have been on the increase there has been a public sector management policy of selling off the school playing fields in which children previously took exercise.  To put the whole of the health burden on the walk to school is to fail to pay attention to the important issue of the availability and accessibility of substantial play areas for children in which informal sports and exercise can take place spontaneously.

 

Travel behaviour education: early socialisation into walking sustains all three other objectives

An important aspect of the walking bus movement is that it does provide an important vehicle for early travel behaviour education.  The adult/child organisation of the walking bus provides a consistent tool for the transmission of road safety knowledge and practice.  The enjoyment of walking can become a long term preference which carries into adulthood: such early socialisation into walking if carried into adulthood would have impact on the environment, the urban context and the health of populations.  The research which establishes that this is the case, and that the walking bus has these benefits, has not yet been done but these are the claims that are routinely made for this policy.

Although, according to the evidence of Gliewe et al. (1998), the majority of primary school children walk to school, in 1998,  there was still evidence of the school run within Germany with the associated problems of congestion around the school gates.  Even though the majority of children are already walking in Germany according to this evidence, the walking bus offers higher levels of safety than children making their own way to school and higher levels of time saving where individual parents presently accompany or escort their children to school.  Historically, Germany had a bad safety record in terms of children and traffic accidents and although those statistics have been greatly repaired, it is still the case that the road safety environment for children can be further improved ( 1998, Gliewe. et. Al).  With this in mind we can note that the walking bus can better negotiate the dangerous elements of the walking environment than can the individual child on his or her own or accompanied by older children.  The walking bus does, indeed look as if it might be appropriate for Germany though for slightly different reasons than are the case in Britain.  In Germany it can be used to ensure that those who are already walking do so in more safety; in Britain it is being used to initiate new patterns of walking behaviour and reverse the child transport patterns that have accompanied the increased household ownership of the private car. The extent to which the walking bus has been adopted in Britain does on the case study evidence available seem to be more extensive than the adoption of the scheme in Germany.

It may very well be that the advocacy and resource providing role of central British government in the context of its policies of the demand management of the private car explains this difference.  In order for the walking bus to be more widely diffused in Germany, it may be that similar institutional champions are needed.  In a slightly different vein, it may be that the provision of transport safety for children in an environment where the bulk of young children already walk provides a slightly different policy rationale for the adoption of the walking bus in Germany.

To summarise, the experts seem to agree that the walking bus is good for children's health, the health of the environment, the working of the urban area, and for the road safety of children.  But what about the gender implications: are these all positive?

 

The current constraints on the walking bus:

We have talked about what the walking bus is and the rationales frequently provided for its adoption but we have now to pose the question are there limitations to the walking bus?  Indeed, there are and these are all too frequently neglected in what has become a major social  wave of adoption of the practice within the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe.

 

Here we focus on those we see as being the most important, there are others but for our purposes today we will focus simply on four of these. In terms of the constraints imposed or adjustments required to make the walking bus viable, there are a set of four issues which must be considered;  these are:

 

• The gender implications in terms of the use of women's time.
• The seasonal dimension and its impact on children's comfort levels whilst walking.
• Pavement design and the dangers of clustering large groups of children together on small pavement spaces adjacent to busy traffic.
• Redesign of land use patterns. http://www.eaue.de/winuwd/56.htm

 

The gender implications in terms of the use of women's time.

Earlier, we indicated that the walking bus could free individual mothers from making the daily journey with their child to school.  But there are other gender implications of the walking bus. 

 

There is a question about the extent to which fathers also become involved in walking bus arrangements: the journey of escorting children to their activities in many contexts typically falls upon women.  There is an issue as to whether the walking bus cements the practice of escorting children to school as a woman's task.  There has been no research as far as we can tell on the gender divide in the volunteer labour associated with walking buses and we have seen no literature which discusses the way in which the volunteering activity around the walking bus could be used to involve fathers in its organisation.  Interestingly on the walking bus literature men are depicted as being involved but what the demography of this involvement is is not known.

 

An additional element to consider is the complexity of the coordination with others the volunteer rota of a walking bus may impose: or on a more routine daily basis, the difficulties involved in ensuring that mothers can get their children ready in time to put them on the walking bus or retrieve them from the walking bus at the end of the day.

 

The car escort journey of child to school or pick up of child from school may give the individual mother greater and necessary flexibility in an urban context where many activities she has to perform are greatly dispersed and have timetables into which she must fit. The private car may be an important scheduling tool for the busy mother in her organisation of the safe escorting of children to their activities. Once again the research into walking buses has primarily been into their safety and into children's perceptions of the arrangements, apart from research which identifies exactly where walking bus projects have been established, there has been no research as far as I can establish into the scheduling difficulties faced by women around the walking bus arrangement and any stresses which may result.  There are some indications in the literature that such problems do occur: some walking buses only pick up children in the morning and do not deliver them back in the evening due to the uncertainty of whether mothers will be there on time to pick up their child.  In the event a mother is not there, then the bus driver and conductor would have to take care of the child until the responsible adult turned up.

 

Thinking about developing a walking bus such factors need to be taken into consideration but there is no clear guidance on them within the promotional literature. The gender implications of the walking bus need to be more closely examined within a better understanding of household travel and task organisation and arrangements developed to cope with any general pattern of difficulties that is observed.

 

The seasonal dimension and its impact on children's comfort levels whilst walking.

Children are the most vulnerable of the users of the travel and transport system: requiring children to walk for the good of the environment whilst adults ride needs to be carefully considered. There are conditions in which walking is healthy for children and there are seasonal conditions in which it is not. Almost every image of the walking bus is taken on a sunny day with no rain in sight: this is great marketing but is a poor register of travel and transport reality.

 

The walking bus needs to be considered with more attention to the seasonal dimension, most particularly, with respect to extreme weather conditions.  A walking bus which is combined with alternative bad weather arrangements such as car sharing or demand responsive transport systems may be a sensible path to take.  As of yet, and in our search of the literature, we have seen no discussion of this aspect: living half the year in the extreme cold temperatures of the great lakes in north America and being aware of the capabilities of new technology in the rapid rescheduling of shared activities, we believe this is a major constraint in the present attractiveness of the walking bus.

 

Pavement design and the dangers of clustering large groups of children together on small pavement spaces adjacent to busy traffic.

In Britain, in many urban areas the pavement infrastructure has not altered in its relationship to the road space since the days of the horse and cart, on the other hand, the volume and speed of the traffic on the road space has greatly increased.  The consequence is that walking buses of children are moving along narrow pavement space with little or nothing but the kerb to separate them from the traffic.

 

In many parts of Germany, this would not be the concern given the protocol and traffic rules which place pedestrians on the inside of pavements towards the shops and houses with cyclists providing the barrier between pedestrians and motorised traffic.

 

In the British context, the adoption of walking to school using walking buses as a youth transport strategy in motorised urban space needs to be accompanied by the redesign of pavement space if the walking bus is to live up to the many claims made for it such as that of being an opportunity for child based sociability.  The walking bus in narrow pavement space will make it difficult for other pedestrians to get past and this creates transport safety dangers for both other pedestrians and children.   We know of no study which has either observed the movement of children in a walking bus along a narrow pavement environment nor do we know of any study which has attempted to model the situation that, given our pavement design, must be pervasive in many British cities.

 

In Germany the conflict between the walking bus and the cyclist may be an issue given the narrowness of pavement space that is given to pedestrians on occasion in the attempt to ensure that there is motorised road space, cyclist pavement space and pedestrian pavement space available.  Cyclists frequently cross on to pedestrian space and this may be an issue where some redesign is required if walking buses are to be supported as a major transport form in Germany.

 

Redesign of land use patterns.

The discussion of congestion, the environment and motorisation which sits at the back of much of the discussion of the walking bus generally fails to engage with the need for the redesign of land use patterns so that motorised travel becomes less necessary and the need for the redesign of land use patterns so that they are more attractive for walking.

 

The walking bus largely takes the form that it does to counterbalance the dangers in the traffic and transport environment already experienced by children on the way to school.  Linking neighbourhoods and schools by traffic free paths or corridors is an important step that needs to be taken if healthy walking is to become a practice.  The availability and accessibility of local schools lies in the hands of the planners and education authorities more so than it does with the travel escort plans of neighbourhood parents.  If children are taken to school by car in the present, it may be regarded as an adjustment to bad or inconvenient land use patterns which have become institutionalised at a large scale under rationales of efficiency and cost savings.  The distances which separate schools and homes have often been rendered relatively invisible as an urban land use problem because of the uncharted escort labour of women in bringing children to the planned point of their educational activities.  The intensification of congestion has revealed the issues with the scale of the school run indicating the extent of gendered household travel activity.  The policy focus has been to eradicate the school run but the accompanying measures necessary have not been taken: the redesign of land use so that children are schooled within their neighbourhood catchment,  the redesign of pathways to schools that are child friendly and traffic free or the provision of green public transport systems which take children the length of their journey without the necessity of the household car being used have not received commensurate investment.

 

The design of car free cities has been a German interest for a long time.  The walking bus movement perhaps indicates that there is a future in such a direction (  http://www.eaue.de/winuwd/56.htm ). 

 

 

Conclusion:

In this inaugural lecture, which took the walking bus as a gender and transport topic within the frame and spirit of the Maria Goeppert Mayer funding that supported it,  we have indicated that there are indeed gender benefits to the walking bus but that more careful research is needed into the specifics of this relationship.  We have indicated that it is important that complementary measures be taken by policy makers in their design of youth transport strategies to make sure that not only are children walking but they are walking in an environment safe from the dangers and fumes of adjacent traffic.

 

In ending this lecture, we want to identify three important areas for development and further thinking around the introduction of the walking bus: they are:

 

• Integrating child travel and transport modes.  Here we believe that children's travel can be better integrated into a range of transport modes.  There is no reason why a walking bus should not join the tram together or make use of demand responsive transport in its journeys.  If only children walk and adults continue to ride, there is an issue at the level of transport equity. Children can take exercise in environments which are free from the fumes of motorised traffic - walking to school is not the sole way to get exercise. Correspondingly if children are provided with high quality environments within which they walk to school, equity issues begin to be addressed.  Removing motorised transport from the most vulnerable to solve the problems of the motorised transport use of the wider society requires very careful consideration.

 

• Evaluating the options and opportunities for flexible walking bus arrangements.  Here we want to draw attention to the benefits of making the most of new information communication technology and enabling children to switch from walking bus to some other mode when circumstances dictate.  Integrating some demand responsive transport options to pick up the single child who stayed behind at school for a club or switching to demand responsive transport for a walking bus when the weather dictates it would provide a higher quality  of transport service to children and their mothers.

 

• Sharing the escort load. Research needs to be undertaken into the present gender patterns of the escort taskloads of walking buses.  Strategies need to be devised for rendering the burden more equitable between women and men.  Walking buses may be good for children's health, under certain conditions, but they must not be injurious to gender equity in transport.

 

 

I thank you for your time today and hope you enjoy reading this lecture again in German or English on the internet on your screens at home.  On screen, it will  give you access to the resources to set up a walking bus in your own community: I hope the cautions provided here will prove unnecessary in each project you establish in this area.

 

Supporting references:

Katja Hartl & Daniela Jauk  (2005) Gender sensitive governance in the field of transport:  Focus Groups with 'Women from the street'. University of Graz, Austria.  Forthcoming in European Spatial Research and Policy.  2006/1

Rudolf Gliewe (ADAC), Maria Limbourg (University of Essen) and Beate Pappritz (ADAC), German Examples of Safer Routes to School.  Paper presented at the Road Safety Education Conference in York, June 1998.  @ http://www.uni-essen.de/~qpd400/texte.ml/york.html

 

UK sites:

• http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/travelwise/travelwise-safer-routes.shtml#walkingbused
• http://www.kentwalkingbus.org/
• http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/Web/corporate/pages.nsf/Links/0B8207464CC5ADC580256C3F004B8361

 

 

German sites and materials:

• http://www.paderborn.de/microsite/walking_bus

        Rudolf Gliewe (ADAC), Maria Limbourg (University of Essen) and Beate Pappritz (ADAC), German Examples of Safer Routes to School.  Paper presented at the Road Safety Education Conference in York, June 1998.  @ http://www.uni-essen.de/~qpd400/texte.ml/york.html

 

 

Swizerland:

• The Pedibus, Bern, Switzerland: http://www.vcs-be.ch/Projekte/Pedibus/Pedibus.htm

 

France:

• http://w.mairie-gieres.fr/article.php3?id_article=293

 

 

New Zealand:

• http://www.pinnacleresearch.co.nz/wsb/wsb.htm

 

Annex 1

Extracted from the Transport For London web site: What is a walking bus? http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/travelwise/travelwise-safer-routes.shtml#walkingbused

(captured 18.10.2005)

 

 

Kent and Medway: Schools participating in Walking Bus schemes: Annex 2  http://www.kentwalkingbus.org/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Annex 3.  Some difficulties: easier to organise on the way to school, harder on the way back. http://www.kentwalkingbus.org/