|
|
 |
You Can Clear The Air: Sending TDM Back to School
| Summary
|
Table of Contents |
Organization
Region of Waterloo
Status
Initiated January 2002, ongoing
Overview
You Can Clear the Air is an educational resource unit
targeted toward elementary school aged children in Grade 3 to create
awareness about more sustainable transportation choices and the impacts
their transportation choices have on the environment. The resource is
also intended to encourage teachers, parents and the larger community to
become more sustainable in their travel choices.The project was developed through a unique partnership involving an
inter-departmental municipal government team (including Transportation
Planning and Grand River Transit staff), two local School Boards, an
educational consultant, teachers and children from pilot classes.
Contact
JoAnn Woodhall
Transportation Demand Management Planner
Email:
wjoann@region.waterloo.on.ca
Telephone: (519) 575-4019
Resources
|
Community Context
Policy
Context
Rationale
and Objectives
Actions
Results
Participants
Resources
Lessons Learned
Next Steps
Feedback on this case
study
Suggest new
topics
|
The Region of Waterloo is a community of 470,000 spread over an
area of 1,382 square kilometres in southwestern Ontario. The regional government
is made up of three municipalities and four townships. Two school boards operate
130 schools in the Region with over 7,000 grade 3 students in about 300 classes.
As with other communities in the area, the Region has been noted as having poor
air quality, increasing traffic congestion, high automobile usage, and worsening
incidences of obesity and asthma.
The Region of Waterloo and Grand River Transit have a reputation as leaders in
innovation; have embraced sustainable urban transportation; and, currently
operate an aggressive transportation demand management program and new transit
marketing initiatives.
[Back to top]
The development of the You Can Clear the Air resource unit was supported by
several key regional transportation policies and documents.
The first and most important is the Region’s Transportation Master Plan which
was adopted in December 1999. The strategic plan incorporates an automobile
reduction strategy which emphasizes maximizing use of the existing
transportation system and targets a 7% reduction in total automobile trips by
the year 2016. The plan recognizes TDM strategies focusing on public transit
enhancement, cycling and pedestrian facilities as the principal means of
achieving the planned automobile reduction target. One of the plan’s thirteen
action steps identifies educating the public on automobile reduction and TDM.
You Can Clear the Air also supports the Region of Waterloo’s Clean Air Plan, the
Regional Official Policies Plan and the recently completed Regional Growth
Management Strategy (RGMS). The RGMS encourages “transportation choice”, a key
component of the You Can Clear the Air project.
The project is also supported by Grand River Transit, the region’s public
transportation provider, in its five year business plan.
[Back to top]
The negative environmental, health and economic impacts
associated with Canadian’s increasing auto dependence pose a critical challenge
to today’s municipal officials. In the Region of Waterloo the challenges are
particularly acute.
According to most recent surveys and reports, 84% of home based
AM Peak Hour trips were made by automobile in the Region of Waterloo, with many
of these trips involving parents driving their children to school. The Region’s
auto dependence has not only resulted in a record number of smog alerts, but
also earned the region the ignominious honour in 1998 of having the worst air
quality conditions in the country according to Canadian Geographic magazine.
Recent studies by the local newspaper have found that 39,000 people in the
region suffer from asthma and that up to sixty people die prematurely every year
because of the region’s poor air quality.
In addition, numerous community leaders had also identified the
negative impacts of parents driving their children to school, including poor air
quality around schools and pedestrian safety concerns.
The long-terms goals of the You Can Clear the Air project are to
educate youth in the Region of Waterloo about transportation options and the
impacts they have on air quality and climate change as is appropriate to the age
group. Specific objectives include:
-
encouraging children and their parents to evaluate their
travel choices to make the wisest travel choice;
-
helping children see how choices about transportation and land
use affect their community;
-
introducing children to using public transit;
-
fostering the development of environmental and health-driven
travel choices early in a child’s development; and,
-
educating teachers about these key issues and fostering their
willingness to support the educational efforts in the classroom as part of their
curriculum delivery.
One of
the student posters placed on local buses
[Back to top]
You Can Clear the Air is a Regional Transportation Demand Management tool that
is a supplement to the Grade 3 Ontario school curriculum. The project provides
materials for teachers to educate young children and their families about their
role in making wise transportation choices.
The unit targets Grade 3 children to try and establish positive transportation
habits and to build a strong environmental awareness that will be the foundation
of more sustainable transportation decisions later in the child’s life. The
project was initiated by the Region of Waterloo in response to the fact that
personal travel behaviours are often well established by the time children reach
the age of sixteen.
The project also seeks to fill gaps in the current curriculum on providing
information about environmental stewardship. You Can Clear the Air includes a
Teachers Guide, a public transit tour component with the region’s transit
service (Grand River Transit), and a promotional campaign called “Our Kids Say…”
The Teachers Guide is a 100-page document that provides teachers with
activities, games, facts and exercises. The guide provides links to other
relevant documents and websites, activity outlines and other resources. The
guide’s activities and learning modules all work to get the message to students,
parents and teachers that the majority of automobile trips made could easily be
made by foot, bicycle or transit.
Activities include a 7-day “family travel audit” that assesses how families
travel and identifies opportunities for change, and a bus tour that introduces
children to public transit safety and use. The bus tour is particularly popular
among students. All activities stress interactivity and creativity. In one,
students see first hand the emissions motor vehicles make by placing a clean
sock over a vehicle’s tail pipe (in one case, a principal’s SUV was used in this
experiment with astonishing results).
The unit was developed to complement Active and Safe Routes to School programs
and references the use of this tool in the teachers guide as a further way to
encourage walking and cycling for school trips.
The module culminates with an exercise that asks students to educate others
about what they have learned. In the project’s first two years, this segment
resulted in exterior ads being placed on Grand River Transit buses which then
brought the message to the rest of the community.
The
cover of the You Can Clear the Air teachers’ resource book
[Back to top]
In its first two years of operation, You Can Clear the Air has
been successfully delivered to 28 classes and 690 students. “Teachers have
embraced the learning unit,” says JoAnn Woodhall, the Region’s Transportation
Demand Management Planner. “Some teachers have even successfully adapted it for
delivery to older grades,” she adds, “while others were so motivated by the unit
that they ended up working to have their schools adopt an environmental
stewardship theme for school pageants. This has helped deliver our message to an
even wider audience.”
[Back to top]
The Project involved people from a variety of organizations
including, the Region of Waterloo the region’s two School Boards and an external
consultant. The project was also assisted by local newspapers who gave
permission to reproduce various articles on the transportation-related subjects.
Internally, the project involved regional staff from a number of
departments and divisions, including Planning, Housing and Community Services,
Transportation Planning, Corporate Resources, Transportation and Environmental
Services, and Grand River Transit.
With clear project goals and previous positive experiences, the
Region was successful in achieving a high level of participation from the two
local School Boards.
Project organizers also met with various community group members
who were developing their own educational projects on transportation, air
quality and related projects in order to avoid duplication of efforts.
[Back to top]
A budget of $25,000 was allocated for initial development and
implementation over an 18 month period. The Region’s Travelwise program and
Grand River Transit provide the operating budgets for ongoing project costs
which include the student take-away packages and the annual update of local
transit map sets. Tours with Grand River Transit buses are provided free of
charge.
The two School Boards have helped market the program to teachers
through regular mailings, provide copies of the unit for downloading from their
websites and delivered a teachers’ workshop on the unit during a professional
day.
[Back to top]
The pilot and follow-up years have provided project members with
a number of valuable lessons for those considering starting a similar program.
Some of the key lessons include:
-
Get senior management buy-in. Getting the support of senior
management at all of the organizations and keeping them informed of project
developments helped move the Let’s Clear the Air project through several
‘sticking points’.
-
Build partnerships. The project owes much of its success to the
strong inter-departmental and inter-organizational partnerships that were
developed. These partnerships have also helped to ensure the continued
implementation and success of the project.
-
Include take-home exercises. Including take-home exercises as
part of the project helped to ensure that parents would hear the messages if
they had not heard them from their children already.
-
Find project champions. Project champions create other champions
in the community and can help broaden the impact of the project.
-
Build a product ‘brand’. Using similar graphics throughout
ensured product recognition for all parties.
-
Teacher input can be difficult to get. Although teacher input is
critical to achieving a product that will be used in the classroom, input was
hard to secure due to teacher workload. Lengthy time periods are needed to get
their feedback, but it is well worth the wait.
-
Do the teaching before getting children to board the bus. The
information session provided by the Grand River Transit facilitator and driver
was first conducted outside by the bus. Once the children queued to board the
bus it was difficult to gain their attention for any learning experience.
[Back to top]
It is fully expected that the You Can Clear the Air project will
continue in future years. Resources have already been identified for the Grand
River Transit Tour, the student take-away package components, and the production
of the physical resources. A hard copy of the unit is available in all school
teacher resource libraries and can also be downloaded from each of the two
School Board’s servers. Specifically, some next steps include:
-
introducing an additional interactive learning tool called a
“Resource Lab” where children can learn about the federal government’s One
Tonne Challenge program;
-
identifying marketing opportunities for the curriculum resource
unit through teachers’ professional development programs; and,
-
developing a program unit for Grade 5 students with more
advanced messaging, focusing on energy systems and, potentially, bicycling
safety.
[Back to top]
|
