"Heavy traffic has reduced the independent mobility of our children and youth," says Catherine O’Brien, a postdoctoral fellow at the York Centre for Applied Sustainability (YCAS) and author of the Ontario Walkability Study. "If parents clearly understood the detrimental effects of the car society on their children, they might think twice about automobile use, and give more serious consideration to transportation alternatives."

O’Brien completed the study with the help of the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, and Greenest City, a non-profit community organization and creator of the Active and Safe Routes to School program in Canada. She compiled data from interviews with 6,369 Ontario students during international Walk to School Day 2000. Close to 75 per cent of those interviewed said they would prefer to walk or cycle to school. "This is a remarkable statement of their desire for active transportation, which has thrived despite the cultural trend toward driving children to school," says O’Brien, whose work contributes to an emerging field of policy research on transportation and children’s health.

The study notes that failure to remove the barriers to walking and cycling could lead to a generation that has no memory of walking to school. It provides survey results and comparisons for 12 municipalities: Toronto, Perth, Oshawa, Markham, North York, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Oakville, Etobicoke, Mississauga, St. Thomas and Kitchener. Additional findings from this and other research in the field show:

• Traffic fatalities are the leading cause of death in Canada for children over the age of one year.
• Fewer than half of Canadian children now walk to school, and the figure drops to 10 per cent in the United States.
• 26.8 per cent of Ontario students surveyed said they would like to ride their bicycle to school, but only 3.5 per cent do.
• Opportunities and locations for spontaneous play are severely restricted by traffic.
• Two out of three Canadian children do not meet average physical activity guidelines to achieve optimum growth and development.
• More than 25 per cent of Canadian and American children and youth are overweight.
• Children may be more vulnerable to airborne pollution because their airways are narrower than those of adults.
• Children have markedly increased needs for oxygen relative to their size. They breathe more rapidly and inhale more pollutant per pound of body weight than adults do. In addition, they may spend more time engaged in vigorous outdoor activities than adults.
• Exposure to traffic noise has been linked to reduced auditory discrimination.
• In Canada, approximately 30 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation.

Parents presented with this information are most struck by the effect of driving on the quality of life of their children, and say education in the schools about sustainable transportation alternatives would help children carry home the message to their parents that the car society is impoverishing childhood experience.

The York Centre for Applied Sustainability in York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies is an organized research unit whose central goal is to make the concept of sustainability a reality in all sectors of society and in people’s daily lives.