Students tackle gridlock woes

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Computer technology combined with street-level knowledge is helping Auckland schools to battle traffic congestion while exercising young minds.

Peer-pressure has already prompted some children to turn down lifts from parents in favour of walking or cycling to school.

Classes at Murrays Bay and Northcross Intermediates on the North Shore are testing a programme that involves mapping travel habits and identifying obstacles to non-vehicular transport.

If successful, the TravelWise course will be extended to schools throughout Auckland as part of their official curriculum.

Murrays Bay and Northcross are among 24 schools devising travel plans with backing from the North Shore City Council and Auckland Regional Council, which are concerned that about 54 per cent of the region's children routinely travel to school by car.

The councils have supplied the intermediates with curriculum units and software that uses street maps made from aerial photographs. Students can find their homes, distances to school and features such as bus stops and cycle paths.

The maps are superimposed with red dots depicting students' homes, leaving the software to bring up on screens the ages of the children and how they get to school - information gained from surveys of students and parents. Names are omitted for privacy reasons.

As well as contributing to learning, the programme is being used to compile travel plans and give planners a wish-list of safety features such as pedestrian crossings and paths for cyclists and pedestrians.

Murrays Bay teacher Alison Johns, who has been seconded to the North Shore council for a year as one of six travel planners and wrote the new curriculum unit, said the beauty of the scheme was its grassroots approach to transport planning.

"We work from the bottom up, rather than having the council and engineers dictate to the schools," she said yesterday.

Year 8 student Sean Bray, 12, said he preferred to walk or cycle the 1.4km to school but sometimes caught a lift with his 17-year-old sister as she drove to Rangitoto College. Asked if he could persuade her to leave the car at home, he said: "No, she's always way too late each day."

But teacher Nyree Hanna said one girl who lived near the school and used to be driven there had been shamed by friends into joining them on foot.


Ms Hanna accepted that some parents had safety concerns but said these would be addressed in the school's travel plan.