Teaching kids to cycle won’t mean more will bike to school, unless road safety and school uniform rules are also addressed, a study suggests.
University of Otago research has been looking at cycle skills training, and asking students and parents what prevents children from cycling to school.
Photo: Mark Hathaway
Associate professor in sport and exercise sciences Sandy Mandic says cycling rates are falling, from 20 percent of children biking to school in the late 1980s to 2 to 3 percent now.
As well, there’s an increase in sedentary activity, she says. Less than 20 percent meet the minimum activity guidelines of about an hour a day, and the average self-reported time in front of a screen is five-and-a-half hours a day during the week. “Some of that is homework but it is certainly not five and a half hours.”
Listen to the full interview with Sandy Mandic
She studied the national cycle training programme being run in five Dunedin schools, in which children were given 10 hours of training over six weeks, both on school grounds and roads where there was light traffic.
The participants’ confidence and knowledge improved but their habits didn’t change. Among primary and intermediate students, there was a 2 percent increase in cycling to school, but there was no corresponding rise among secondary students.
Mandic says separate research reveals more about why that might be the case.
The five-year Built Environment and Active Transport to School (BEATS) study surveyed adolescents in 12 Dunedin secondary schools and parents.
It found teenagers would choose walking to school rather than biking, which they see as less safe. They also had less encouragement from friends, parents and schools to bike as opposed to walking.
About half said they enjoyed cycling recreationally, such as mountain biking, but less than 10 percent wanted to cycle to school.
“Uniforms play a big role in it, especially for girls,” Mandic says. Most of the schools they looked at didn’t allow students to walk or cycle in different clothing and change into their uniform when they arrive.
Parents had safety worries - not so much about how many cars were on the road, but whether their children had the skills to cycle safely, and how other road users behaved.
They didn’t see truck drivers as a problem; “they said they were actually quite considerate of the cyclists”.
“They were more concerned about private vehicle users, for example other parents with children in the car that are distracted on the phone. And I know that’s not legal any more, but it certainly was when we did the study.”
Mandic will be carrying out another study on the effect of the cycleways being built around Dunedin and changes to pedestrian areas.
The research group will be looking at six schools which had cycleways or changes to pedestrian infrastructure nearby find out if it made a difference to how many students walked or biked to school.
“There is no similar study done in adolescents anywhere else in the world.”