Blogs

Active Healthy Kids Canada is a national organizations with a pretty clear mission (hint: its in their name). Every year they put out a Report Card that provides a comprehensive assessment of the current state of physical activity among Canadian children and youth.

This year's Report, entitled "Are We Driving Our Kids To Unhealthy Habits?" has a strong focus on active transportation. Active Healthy Kids Canada gives the country a D (down from a D+ last year) on the current state of active transportation activity for kids, but emphasizes that it is a key area in which quick gains can be made and long term impacts realized.

Learn more about this year's report after the break.

Every time I do a presentation to a group of adults, whether they're teachers, parents or community members, I try to lead off with a question: "How many of you walked or rode your bike to school?" It helps to break the ice and set the context, and I always see a lot of hands go up, some smiles, and a few people looking around the room.

Today, walking to school is something most adults can relate to from personal experience. Even if they drive their own kids to school, the idea of making the trip on foot just makes sense. In a generation, adults may think of walking to school as a quaint anachronism from a bygone age; our statistics tell us that most of them will have been driven to school their whole student careers.

by Kristi Hendricks

It’s not every day that you meet a principal willing to dye his hair green to promote active transportation, but that’s what Jacob Sol did. Former principal of McBride elementary school in New Westminster, Sol saw the volume of traffic at his school, and realized that the rushed drivers posed a safety risk for his students.

Read about Mr. Sol's challenge to students, and how they rose to meet it, after the break.

The sun is shining, it's Throwback Thursday, and with only a month to go until Bike to School Week, we thought it high time to dig this one out of the vault: Jackson Goldstone takes the long way to Kindergarden.

A relatively recent addition to the street-scape in many BC communities, cross-walk timers seem to be sprouting up all over the place this Spring.

Many municipalities are planning to install counters at all full traffic-signaled intersections. The countdown timers provide pedestrians with more information as they decide whether or not to cross the street, thereby making the experience safer and more comfortable. 

But ironically, while the evidence suggests that crosswalk timers make crossing the street safer for pedestrians, reducing the likelyhood of collisions with automobiles, a new study suggests that they may be making pedestrian crossings more dangerous - for cars.

To all the drivers getting into trouble because of these benign additions to our communities, HASTe has your fix after the break.

by Kristi Hendricks

Each year thousands of children in the Central Okanagan come together for an exciting event put together by Traffic Safety Officer, Dave Gibson.

As Regional Traffic Safety Officer, Gibson runs Bike Rodeos, working with his team to ensure that the children in both the city of Kelowna and the Region of Central Okanagan have the knowledge they need to confidently operate their bikes and navigate their routes safely. Hosted in anticipation of Bike to School Week, 2012 saw 2093 students attend the rodeos which were held at 12 schools across the region.

To learn more about Dave's work encouraging walking and cycling to school, click here.

photo credit: HASTe's own Kerry Hamilton

Last fall, researchers in Denmark conducted a study involving 20,000 students to determine whether there was a connection between nutrition and students' ability to concentrate. Although this part of the study didn't yield the expected results, the team did find something unexpected and very interesting: children who walked or rode their bicycles to school seemed to be able to concentrate better than their peers who were driven.

Learn more about this connection after the break

Minimum parking requirements in bylaws and planning determine the fewest number of free automobile parking spots a new building is required to have. A number of influential planners have pointed out the obvious problems with the premise of these minimum requirements. But with many drivers seeing free parking as something akin to a fundamental human right, the practice persists in most of the Western world.

Requiring free and plentiful parking is problematic for a number of reasons - it harms the environment, generates vehicle congestion, promotes suburban sprawl, encourages inactivity and drives up building costs (there's no such thing as truly free parking) - but requiring schools to provide abundant parking is particularly bad planning.

Find out why after the break.

This may sound strange, but this picture really warms my heart:

Kids on bikes in the snow with big grins. But even better is the backstory to the picture. Check it out after the break

As the days get shorter, wetter and a little less pleasant, here's a nice little video from the folks at the Canadian Automobile Association with a simple reminder about other "road users": whether they're cyclists, drivers, pedestrians (or all three), they're all people.