'Bike to School' Workshop and Survey results

Danish research (20,000 kids) has shown that kids who cycle or walk to school (rather than by car or public transportation) perform measurably better on tasks demanding concentration and this effect lasts for up to four hours (stronger effect than making sure they eat breakfast!). Other research around active school transport has shown better way-finding skills, superior school grades, and kids who are more physically active among the groups who wheel and walk to school.

Inspired by this research, along with our own biking traffic study (ongoing), we surveyed parents in Cochrane (N=269 in May/June 2021), and came back with pretty rich data around what the barriers are to actively transporting kids to school. This survey was sent out from almost all of the schools in their weekly newsletters, along with posts to social media, and a notice in the newspaper as well.

A summary of our findings is shown below.

Bike Cochrane’s Bike to School Survey 2021 Findings

While the slope of our pathways is a challenge (we’ve measured as high as 26% in both Sunset and Gleneagles), there isn’t a pathway spec in Cochrane. So not surprisingly, our developers build pathways as cheaply as they can, and these are steep. We would like to see the Town write a pathway specification to keep our pathways less than 8% (as Canmore and Calgary and Vancouver and many others have), but let’s leave that topic for now.

Further to the basic findings that 91% of parents WANT their kids to be able to wheel and walk to school, we dove quite a bit deeper into the safety barriers that parents cited. Having ‘open text’ survey questions meant that we got very rich data into where parents felt unsafe with their kids on bikes, scooters, or by foot. These types of responses are harder to classify, but Bike Cochrane’s active transportation committee tried a few different ways of pulling this data into actionable pieces. See an attempt below at classifying the safety concerns of parents:

Summary of Specific Issues in Cochrane that make parents feel unsafe about wheeling and walking

Another way to try to illustrate these challenges is with a word cloud as shown below, capturing the raw text from or survey respondents around ‘safety issues’.

Word Cloud of ‘Safety Issues’ for Cochrane parents around ‘Wheeling and Walking’ to school

Trying to take a deeper look into the infrastructure-related issues in Cochrane helps us to better prioritize future active transportation investments. Taking every comment from the survey along with understanding the school (destination) and the neighbourhood (origin) of the respondent allowed us to place their comments on a map of Cochrane, and then work back a set of ‘clusters of concern’ within the Town. The top 5 of those concerns are listed below, along with the painstaking work to place the red/orange pins accurately along the map.

Clusters of concern for active transportation in Cochrane per Bike to School Survey 2021

The first item here is being worked on through the recent 1A construction (thank you to our Town for driving this work!). The second item (Highway 22 at Quigley/Glenbow) has been raised with Alberta Transportation since Hwy 22 (and Hwy 1A) are provincial highways. Intersection safety is very important though and Bike Cochrane will continue to work with the Town to advocate for improvements to this corridor sooner than later. At the very least, painting proper zebra stripes annually needs to be done at this intersection. Bike Cochrane placed a bike counter for June and showed almost 6000 bikes on the SIDEWALK of Quigley Drive and it correlated strongly with school hour commuting, so that’s a LOT of kids crossing this intersection. While (thankfully) there haven’t been many actual collisions, there have been a LOT of near misses, mostly from left/right turns across the crosswalk.

The 3rd item (a proper pathway through the Ranche) has been called out by the many plans that have looked at the Town’s infrastructure (Bike Network Plan 2012, Connecting Cochrane 2017), but it simply hasn’t been done yet. With the amount of discussions about pathways and sidewalks and non-vehicular transportation this recent election, we’re hopeful that our new Town Council will make this a priority sooner than later and address the active transportation deficit in Cochrane.

The 4th item (Heritage/Heartland can’t directly get to downtown) will be addressed in the 1A/22 intersection plans with a pathway on the south side of the 1A. See those plans (from April 2021) HERE although the Town will need to connect into this new pathway underpass.

The last item (Quigley Drive being unsafe for kids presently) is coming up for a redesign/rework in 2023’s capital budget, and Bike Cochrane looks forward to working with the Town on better solutions than simply painting bike lanes on roads. While a dorky spandex-clad road biker (like me) is fine with this, I’m only ~2% of cyclists, and neither my wife, my kids, nor my Mom feel safe on bike lanes with traffic zipping by me.

If you’re still reading, then you clearly want to see our complete ‘Bike to School 2021’ survey results HERE.

WORKSHOP!

Armed with our excellent survey results, along with a presentation from Subha from Share The Road, and an AMAZING guest speaker in Andy from the Town of Canmore (note that Canmore recently received a silver award from Bike Friendly Communities), on Oct 5th, Bike Cochrane hosted our first annual ‘Bike to School’ Workshop. We had excellent representation from the Town, along with Urban Systems, and worked through various routes on Town maps that fictitious students would take from their homes to a specific school. See our attendees working on routing/safe maps below:

Angie and Simon from the Town’s Parks and Open Spaces Team

We followed their routes using e-bikes and got a chance to see on the ground some of the barriers that schoolchildren in Cochrane face every day as they try to wheel and walk to school. See our team on e-bikes crossing highway 1A at the crosswalk heading up to the Tri-schools area

Bike Cochrane’s ‘Bike to School’ Workshop crossing Highway 1A on their bikes

The feedback from the workshop was very positive and the actions and outcomes will be measured over the course of the incoming Council and our ability to get these projects into capital budget planning cycles.

Bike Cochrane and our workshop attendees will be advocating for improvements to our active transportation network. The goal is that any child in any community in Cochrane should be able to safely wheel and walk to any school. Bike-Friendly Communities encouraged our workshop team to start a Task Force towards applying for Cochrane to become a ‘Bike Friendly Community’, and this and other actions will come out of this workshop.

If you’re passionate about active transportation and want to see Cochrane ‘grow up’ as a community, please reach out to Bike Cochrane to join our active transportation committee. Email Paul at paul@bikecochrane.com and let’s help Cochrane get better at connecting our communities along with helping our kids have a better future!