Kids don’t ride bikes to school in the same numbers as they used to. Parents are the problem – and the solution.
It’s 8.10am on a Thursday, and Auckland’s weather has already tried being sunny, drizzly, gusty and nippy. Now it has settled on greyness.
The asphalt is grey. So are most of the cars.
Trucks (grey and white) and buses (grey and navy) roar along Point Chevalier Road, a busy vein connecting the suburb with the main motorway artery.
When the Point Chevalier bike train appears on the footpath, it’s like a ray of sunshine: yellow vests, vivid helmets and bright little faces, focussing hard.
The children dismount and cross the road in a cluster, a protective adult at the front and the rear of the group.
Keeping children safe is the most important goal of a bike train. Having fun is the second goal, which is why organiser Matt Fordham has instigated a tradition he probably regrets: ‘joke corner’. This puts the parent helpers at considerable risk of terrible jokes.
The children have stopped for a hot chocolate so that we can interview them, which naturally includes hearing all the best punchlines.
Marco Christopherson, 6, shares a joke with his friends from the Pt Chevalier bike train.
Marco Christopherson, 6, shares a joke with his friends from the Pt Chevalier bike train.
Marco Christopherson is 6, with great balance and an impish face. He’s an absolute charmer, but his humour is 100% 6-year-old-boy. “Why did the toilet paper roll down the hill? To get to the bottom,” is the best one.
Owen (“capital O, always”) Buchan, also 6, can’t think of a joke right now. He’s only been part of the bike train for three days.
They’re sitting with Harry Rowan, 8, who has been cycling to school for a “long, long, long time.”
The three boys can’t name anything that isn’t cool about the bike train, except when you fall off. In fairness to Fordham, the dramatic crashes they describe all sound like they happened on weekends.
Pink-cheeked Willow Fordham, 6, Matt Fordham’s daughter, started riding because her brother Elliot was doing it. “I’ve been on this for basically as long as my brother,” she says. “He’s 10.”
Willow and her little sister Liberty, 5, are sitting with Sabine Christopherson, 8. The three girls like riding because it gives them more energy at school, and they get to play with their friends. They don’t like dismounting to cross the road when it's raining because their bike seats get wet. “It’s safety, though,” Willow says, sagely.
Three elders of the bike train are also here, Elliot Fordham, Jack Rowan and Freya Whitfield (all 10). They have mastered safe riding to the point where their parents let them ride themselves to school.
Freya likes how riding helps the environment, is fun and gives her exercise. Elliot says learning to be a confident cyclist has helped him a lot (as a person). Jack says if he was driven to school, he wouldn’t know his way around the neighbourhood.
As the 10-year-olds’ judgement matured, so did their punchlines. Slightly.
Here’s Freya.
“Knock knock.”
Who’s there?
“Interrupting cow.”
Interrupting cow wh–
“MOOOOOO!”.
“Dad joke,” they say, cracking up.
Stronger bones, lighter minds
Fordham started the cycle train five years ago.
“The weather has never, ever stopped us,” he says. “We’ve had days where we’re huddled under trees, putting on wet weather gear and splashing through puddles. It’s actually part of the fun.”
For many parents, joining in is as simple as waving their children off at the gate. Others come along as helpers.
No one’s gonna let a kid go to school on their own at [age 5 or 6] and a lot of parents have to work. So we’ve got a system where we can have two parents take 12 kids.
Research suggests the children are benefiting themselves by cycling, as well as their parents.
Not only does biking or walking give kids stronger bones and muscles, and reduce anxiety and depression, it appears to improve their self-esteem, independence, and spatial navigation.
It is a straightforward way to get most of the 60-plus minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise recommended for children each day. Some surveys suggest many children prefer it to walking. (Teenagers might be the opposite, according to one researcher).
Crucially for the planet, an active school journey increases the chances that a child will grow up to commute by foot, bike or scooter, helping prepare kids for a society with lower greenhouse gas emissions.
“If we transferred every single car overnight into an electric vehicle, we would have solved pollution problems. But we won’t solve congestion. We won’t solve physical activity,” says Professor Simon Kingham, a transport researcher at the University of Canterbury and chief science adviser to the Ministry of Transport.
Every child who bikes to school makes the road a little safer and less congested for everyone else, he says - including those who can’t cycle.
Declining species
Children who bike to school in Aotearoa should be as treasured as our native birds, says Jolisa Gracewood, a writer who advocates for cycling. Like wobbly baby kākāpō, Gracewood believes, these children need protected areas so their numbers can grow.
While thankfully not as close to extinction as the endangered kākāpō, cyclist numbers have plummeted since the late 1980s.
New Zealand’s rates have never been as high as they are in biking powerhouse the Netherlands, where residents of some cities make up to 70% of journeys by bicycle.
But driving to school was not the norm here, even as recently as the 1990s.
Between 1978 and 1980 in Auckland, approximately 20% of intermediate school students cycled to school, according to a 1980 report by the aptly-named Auckland Bicycle Planning Committee. (The figure was cited more recently by transport researcher Hamish Mackie). At some schools, rates were as high as 45-70%.
Biking to school was still common in 1989/90, when, according to Waka Kotahi’s household travel survey, about 19% of teenagers aged 13-17 nationally cycled to school, along with 12% of children aged 5-12.
At that point, only between a quarter and a third of children and teenagers went to school in cars. The rest walked or took public transport.
By 1997/8, cycling rates had dropped to 11% for 13-17s, and 7% for 5-12s.
There were plenty of kids still walking or bussing, but driving or being driven had mopped up the drop-off in cyclists and then some - rates of arriving by car had risen to almost 40% of teens and 46% of younger children.
At last count, just 3% of the teen group and 2% of younger children biked to school.
Meanwhile, the proportion being driven hasn’t fallen below half since 2007.
What kids want
Surveys suggest that parents, not children, are behind the shift.
When Bradley Minton and India Essuah from FOLKL research company in Napier asked parents at four Hastings primary schools why their children travelled the way they did, the most common reason was “it fits in with my family routine”. Spread-out cities and patchy public transport – particularly in smaller cities such as Hastings and Napier – mean parents are often driving to work anyway.
Some parents told the researchers they “feel like they can’t start work until they know their students are at school,” Essuah says. “Some worked a long 12-hour day doing shift work, so that car ride in the morning was the only time they got with their children,” she says.
The car run was not necessarily efficient, however. Minton regularly saw parents arriving outside one school at 2.15pm – 30 minutes’ before the bell – to snaffle the best car parks.
For the children, stray dogs, not owning bikes, or parents who didn’t know how to fix a flat tyre were among the barriers.
“They saw that gap between their house and school as really unpredictable,” says Essuah.
We’d ask them, what would be something bad that could happen if you biked to school and they’d say, hitting a rock or falling off or getting their bike stolen.
In another study, parents indicated they’d only let their younger children cycle in a bike train.
But such groups often live and die with a single, motivated parent, Minton says.
They require “special” levels of organisation by already-stretched school staff, adds Kingham, the transport ministry science adviser. “The ones that seem to work best often have a paid parent who facilitates or organises them.”
But paying bike train organisers hasn’t been a priority in transport funding, he adds.
Research suggests there’s untapped demand.
When Mackie surveyed children at six Auckland and Tauranga schools for a 2009 report for Waka Kotahi, he found more than twice as many of them wanted to cycle (22% on average) than were able to (9%).
The only school that had reached saturation was Mount Maunganui Intermediate, where 20% of students biked.
In 2016, he surveyed Auckland’s Mt Roskill Grammar and two nearby intermediate schools, and found fewer (20%) pupils wanted to travel by car than by bike (27%). Another 10% said they’d prefer to use a scooter or skateboard if they had the choice.
The kids might be onto something: unlike many planet-saving activities, riding a bike is actually fun, says Kingham. “No one thinks, oh I want to wash my tin can out and put it in the recycling,” he says. “But people actually like cycling. They go on holiday and they go cycling.”
On a deeper level, two University of Auckland researchers recently suggested biking might reduce climate anxiety. Already, children and teenagers are living in a climate hotter than human civilization has ever experienced and every fraction of a degree Celsius makes floods, heatwaves, droughts and other impacts worse. Fossil-fuelled transport is one of the major culprits.
“They cannot drive, they cannot vote and they have the most to lose if we cannot come up with greener transport solutions,” wrote researchers Kirsty Wild and Professor Alistair Woodward in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health.
The pair concluded young people needed more everyday opportunities to do routine activities to restore hope, like biking to school.
What we tend to give them instead is a ride to the school gate, and a car when they turn 16.
Mountains to climb
When researchers ask children and parents what prevents children from cycling, the list is as long and varied as a list of New Zealand’s neighbourhoods.
Fordham’s company Crank has helped implement safety projects at 12 Auckland schools, and he says the barriers are different in every part of the city, from affordability, to convenience, to caregivers who don’t know how to ride.
Distance to school is an obvious factor; since it’s easier to cycle if you live nearby.
For teenagers, particularly girls, research carried out in Christchurch found peer pressure was a major obstacle, along with lack of confidence, worries about being seen as ‘feminine’, personal security and impact on hair, namely from wearing a helmet. Boys in Aotearoa are typically more likely to cycle than girls are, and older children are more likely to cycle than younger ones.
Then there are the actual hills.
A Stuff analysis of results from the 2018 census shows 10-14-year-olds typically had higher rates of cycling than younger children or older teenagers. Yet even in that age group there were 749 neighbourhoods (of a total of about 2000) where no 10-14-year-olds cycled.
We also calculated a ‘hilliness’ score for each neighbourhood, using a dataset that measures the land elevation every 15 metres. Rather than calculating an average height above sea level, we calculated how much the height changed from one point to the next – an indication that the land is undulating up and down.
Flat, wealthy areas tended to have more cycling – there was a correlation between hilliness and lower incomes, and suburbs with low or zero rates of cycling to school. Christchurch, being flatter than Wellington, had more school cyclists.
The chart below shows how that score affects cycling rates. The 0% neighbourhoods aren’t included, to make the trend among the remaining areas clearer. A flatter ridgeline indicates the rates are more spread out, while big peaks indicate that lots of suburbs are clustering around a particular rate.
Hilliness deters children from cycling to school
Each dot represents a suburb
Each ridgeline represents the overall distribution of cycling rates in each ‘hilliness’ category.
Hilliest
Mid−range
Flattest
0%
20%
40%
60%
Cycle rate
Hilliness deters children
from cycling to school
Each ridgeline represents the overall distribution of cycling rates in each ‘hilliness’ category.
Each dot represents a suburb
Hilliest
Mid−range
Flattest
0%
20%
40%
60%
Cycle rate
Hilliness deters children from cycling to school
Each ridgeline represents the overall distribution of cycling rates in each ‘hilliness’ category.
Each dot represents a suburb
Hilliest
Mid−range
Flattest
0%
20%
40%
60%
Cycle rate
Finally, for each neighbourhood, we also calculated the straight-line distance to the nearest school (normally a primary or intermediate school). The radar charts below show how all of these factors – terrain, distance, and wealth – interplay to affect cycling rates.
Children at the six schools Mackie surveyed in 2009 said things that would help included seeing their mates biking, riding with friends or parents, cheaper bikes, separated cycleways, fun activities (joke corner, anyone?) and being allowed to ride on the footpath.
Their parents mentioned busy roads, ‘stranger danger’ and security as off-putting concerns.
The overriding deterrent they identified was traffic: both the speed of it and the quantity.
Mackie’s report pointed out that, while cycling was riskier than driving or walking, the overall risk remained small – a 10-14-year-old was more likely to die by drowning, for example.
But even the appearance of risk was a problem.
“A quick observation of the road environment around many New Zealand schools at 8am or 3.30pm helps to explain why students don’t cycle to school,” said the study.
“Even if many of our road environments aren’t actually dangerous for students cycling to school … they certainly look it.”
“The reality is, you just need one car to cut you too close and that can be enough to stop you cycling,” says Kingham.
Crunch point
The school gate is a flashpoint for safety worries, a place where increasingly heavy, numerous vehicles vie to get as close to school as possible. It’s the location of 75% of meltdowns by parents between 8-9am and 65% of child meltdowns during the same window, an unscientific polling by Stuff, concluded.
“You have heaps of cars, heaps of kids all coming together for a short period of time,” says Fordham. “I see it every morning, cars pulling into driveways where there's like 10 kids trying to walk.”
“The irony,” says Kingham, the transport adviser, “is that if you ask those parents why they drive their kids to school, many of them would say they don't feel it's safe for their kids because of the traffic.”
They don’t notice that they are the traffic.
Kingham says there are relatively cheap solutions to some of the biggest safety concerns: getting kids dropped 100m from school to make the school gate area safer for those outside of cars, closing strategic local roads to through-traffic to prevent cars cutting through, and reducing speeds to 30km. “If you’re hit by a vehicle going 30km you’ve got about a 90% chance of surviving. If it’s going 50km you’ve got about a 10% chance.
Separated lanes are another solution. Kingham notes New Zealand has big, wide residential streets – plenty of room to give bikes and scooters separated lanes without having to widen roads if councils are willing to convert some on-street car parking.
Residents sometimes push back against this, yet if kids cycle or walk, it’s easier for adults to leave their cars at home, says Alec Tang, Director of Sustainability at Kāinga Ora. “Getting to childcare is one of those critical trips that we know is a breaking point, because people have to drop off someone else so they’ll do that first and then carry on [in a car],” he says.
“If you can send your kid off to school and they can cycle safely and you’re confident they’re going to get there, that's one less thing that you as a parent or caregiver needs to do.”
Two parents can take a dozen children to school, making it easier for those parents who need to start work earlier.
Two parents can take a dozen children to school, making it easier for those parents who need to start work earlier.
The school gate conundrum is deeply familiar to Phillipp Otto, Deputy Principal at Napier Girls’ High School.
His school is up a steep hill on narrow roads. Out of a roll of roughly 1000 girls, approximately four intrepid souls cycle to school, Otto says.
“The typical parent behaviour… results in parents driving up the narrow road… then having to do a three-point turn.”
“Students are hopping out of cars and darting across the road and [risking] getting run over by other parents.
“It’s very difficult to organise and control, because parents feel entitled, we were hearing, ‘well you can't stop us, it's a public road’,” he says.
Students want to drive to school as soon as they get their licences, Otto says, despite being concerned about climate change. It’s a car-centric city, he says. “They have this urge for freedom and excitement, and all they can do is buy a petrol car.”
With cycling being a tough sell, Otto and his colleagues decided to encourage as many students as possible to be picked up and dropped off at the bottom of the hill to improve safety at the gate – meaning a puff-inducing walk of about 10 minutes.
The school and the local council got Essuah and Minton from FOLKL involved to assess the dangers that were putting pupils off.
Risky corners were easy to spot – at one five-way intersection, pupils were having to wait on the road to cross because there was no footpath space, Essuah says.
Parents’ driving was atrocious, says Minton.
We spent a lot of time at a busy intersection at drop-off and pick-up time and wow, my heart was racing watching all these close calls.
“[Parents’] would kind of pull up on the curb and do a rolling drop off… or their car doors were opening onto a busy road...”
The council arranged speed bumps, bollards, new stairs, and safe islands where large groups of students could stand and wait safely to cross. Students decorated the new crossing with street art, and came up with a campaign name: Walk the Talk, Hike the Hill. Minton and Essuah came to school assembly and gave out pizza vouchers.
Plenty of drivers hated the changes. The local paper dedicated its front page to criticising the speed bumps, but students overwhelmingly said they felt safer.
For Minton, the numbers told the story: “before, the highest speed we clocked going through during school hours was 85km per hour. After the speed bumps, [it] was 42km.”
Deputy principal Otto says seeing the bright street art cheers him up every morning – and parents’ behaviour is (mostly) better. “I wouldn't say we’ve solved 100% of our problems, but it’s definitely much better.”
Safe habits
Hike the Hill was one of Waka Kotahi’s ‘Innovating Streets for People’ projects, many of which are designed to trial new street layouts before making them permanent. Many have faced severe pushback: A trial of planter boxes to create temporary cul de sacs to reduce traffic in Auckland’s Onehunga ran into 75% local opposition after residents complained about increased driving times.
Fordham says trialling changes temporarily is cheaper and more flexible than pouring concrete, and it gives people a chance to see how the changes work before judging them. At one school, a trial crossing made from rubber barriers was moved eight metres up the road, to much better impact.
Fully-separated cycleways are part of the answer, but they often cater for adult commuters better than children, he says.
Four-way stops were trialled in the first phase of the Nelson City Council's Innovating Streets project in Nelson South. The Government plans to make it easier for councils to test safety improvements to existing roads to see if they encourage walking and cycling.
Four-way stops were trialled in the first phase of the Nelson City Council's Innovating Streets project in Nelson South. The Government plans to make it easier for councils to test safety improvements to existing roads to see if they encourage walking and cycling.
After six children were struck by cars in driveways in Point Chevalier in 2019, 150 children dropped letters in the mailboxes of thousands of homes, reminding drivers to look out for kids. “If you were to protect all those kids [with cycleways], you would need a cycleway from every letterbox, to every school, to every shop and it’s just not going to happen,” says Fordham.
“Safety is also educating people coming out of driveways on how to do that safely, and educating parents that if they're taking their 5-year-old to school on a bike, don’t let your kid cycle half a block in front of you.”
Tony Coughlan, principal of Auckland’s Royal Oak Intermediate, agrees.
He doesn’t want to downplay the dangers – a young person was killed up the road from his school recently. But he hasn’t been knocked off in 22 years’ of cycling. A big part of safety is being visible, and that comes about by getting more people biking, he says.
When Coughlan took his job at Royal Oak Intermediate four years ago, he began meeting a group of pupils each morning at the suburb of Mangere Bridge. He and another teacher would lead them along a protected seafront cyclelane, over the motorway and up a hill, a one-way trip of about 4km. Coughlan persuaded the local board to put in a raised crossing at the most dangerous point.
After about three weeks, the students were confident enough to ditch him.
“They just went off and did their own thing,” he says. “What was even cooler was that they started bringing their friends, so I'd find a kid who we’d got biking to school with one of their mates who hadn't been biking previously,” he says.
Coughlan is about to enlarge the school bike shed for the second time in three years.
In response to councils complaining that it’s too hard to make safety changes like the ones Coughlan, Fordham, Minton and Essuah helped secure, the Government is proposing a law change.
The plan is to make it easier for councils to repurpose existing road space with fewer regulatory hurdles, so, for example, car parking lanes could become bike/scooter lanes and speed limits around schools could be lowered, if schools and councils asked for that. It would also allow councils to designate ‘school streets’ – effectively ‘no car’ zones outside school gates at busy times.
Transport Minister Michael Wood says the changes would help “decongest” school streets, though it’s clear he already expects pushback from people who do not appreciate the changes. His retort is that it’s impossible to combat climate change whilst keeping doing the same old thing.
Consultation on the changes closes this month. Wood says Waka Kotahi is already working with councils to make a shortlist of projects to fund, and priority will go to those that can be built within two years. The first proposals to be approved by Cabinet were announced last week.
This is “quick, simple-to-stand-up stuff,” he says. “The purpose isn't to be investing in big, heavy, hard infrastructure.”
Back at Point Chevalier Road, Fordham is trialling an app to “gamify” school cycling. Kids get points for logging a walk or a bike, and bonus points for bringing a friend or biking in wet weather. Whole classes, or whole schools, could compete, he says.
The bike train is still recovering from Covid, which dented some kids’ confidence about cycling with another parent, he says. On the flipside, the fact that more parents work from home now might help to swell the ranks.
Fordham relies on parent helpers, and he takes their safety seriously, though not perhaps quite as seriously as he takes the children’s.
Just this week, he says, he heard a very decent joke from Saskia Bayliss, 5 – one that would make any volunteer parent smile rather than cry.
Q: How do you make a tissue dance?
A: Put a little boogie in it.
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