This project will expand on the successful Walking School Bus and Drive to 5 active school travel (AST) pilot at Windebank Elementary School to two more schools, and create a District-wide “Safe Routes to School” map. This work represents the next steps towards a comprehensive School District-wide AST Plan which will lay the foundation for improving travel safety for children in Mission and positively shifting the culture around safe active transportation within the School District.
The Mission Public School District has 17 schools, with 6757 students enrolled for the 2023/2024 school year. Like many other communities, Mission faces a growing challenge as students and families who are trying to travel to and from school on foot or by bike encounter a sub-optimal infrastructure such as a lack of sidewalks and poorly marked crossings. Compounded by erratic and unsafe driving behaviours, many parents have resorted to driving their children to school which increases traffic volumes and associated safety issues. Unfortunately, incident data supports these concerns. At one of the schools that will be participating in this project (West Heights Elementary), between 2018 and 2022 there were eight pedestrian-involved crashes in the immediate vicinity of the school and 24 within its catchment area. There were nine pedestrian-involved crashes proximate to the other new participating school (Albert McMahon Elementary) during the same period, with a total of 12 occurring in its catchment area. A parent at Albert McMahon shared how she witnessed a child being hit in a crosswalk two blocks from the school. A week later, there was another child hit in a crosswalk two blocks further north. These incidents are far more than abstract statistics for the school community, and are catalyzing actions to create safer active mobility options for children and their caregivers.
An analysis conducted in 2020/21 highlighted that 60% of grade 5 students are driven to school, and 54% are driven home. As the community continues to grow, it is imperative that actions are taken now to create safer streets for students and families. The District Superintendent stated that “our parking lots were not designed for the number of cars that go through them. This has created an unsafe environment with increasing numbers of near misses, unsafe congestion, and fire lane blockages. Due to these safety concerns, parents do not feel comfortable letting their kids walk to school but by continuing to drive them the safety conditions worsen, perpetuating the cycle. We have hired crossing guards at Windebank and some other locations but this still has not significantly improved the situation.”
Our project employs a collaborative approach to tackle the identified road safety concerns in Mission through education and new program development, while the City focuses on infrastructure. To address safety concerns, we will be working with all our partners to conduct a series of walkabouts to create "Best Routes to School" maps for each school in the District (excluding the secondary and alternative school). Additionally, the data collected will inform the City's Official Community Plan. In this project three schools will be implementing programming to help increase Active School Travel (AST) uptake. As part of our commitment to equity, our District planning objective is to ensure that schools in diverse settings receive targeted assistance to foster a culture of safe and active travel. In addition to the mapping, all of the project findings alongside collected best practices will be compiled into a Mission-specific AST Toolkit in collaboration with our partners to support long-term AST uptake across the District. This comprehensive toolkit will contain surveys, best practices, recommendations, and insights from lessons learned.
An impact assessment will be conducted to measure changes in commuting behaviours, the number of students engaged in active travel, the number of participants in the Walking School Buses, student engagement in the project, and parental uptake and perceptions of safety.
Photo source: Pexels. Photo is shown for illustration purposes only and may not be an accurate representation of the project.
