Cars before kids: automobility and the illusion of school traffic safety.

Cars before kids: automobility and the illusion of school traffic safety. DESPITE THE INHERENT DANGER OF VEHICLE traffic, particularly forvulnerable populations, such as children, sociological and educationalresearch has given scant attention to traffic safety. Motor vehiclecrashes are a leading cause of injury and death of elementaryschool-aged children in westernized countries, such as Canada (PublicHealth Agency of Canada 2007). In 2005 alone in Canada, 79 children aged5 to 14 were killed in motor vehicle collisions--52 were passengers, 24were pedestrians (possibly including cyclists), and 3 were drivers(Transport Canada 2006). (1) As these figures illustrate, more childrenare killed regularly inside the car as passengers than outside cars.Even while one might assume that cars are "safe spaces" forchildren, they can be death traps. Far more children die from vehiclecrashes (inside or outside vehicles) than the malicious intent ofstrangers--"stranger danger"--the focus of much media andpublic discourse (Valentine 1997). For instance, of the 33 homicidedeaths in 2005 of Canadian children under the age of 12, one wascommitted by a stranger (Dauvergne and Li 2006). (2) Injury statisticsof vehicle crashes reveal even further the vulnerability of children inthe road environment. In 2005 approximately 11,000 children aged 5 to 14were injured in vehicle crashes across Canada (Transport Canada 2006),(3) with 972 children aged 5 to 13 injured in British Columbia (BC)(Insurance Corporation of British Columbia [ICBC] 2006). The regularityof vehicle crashes suggests that, rather than "accidents,"they are a systemic problem due to the automobile's dominance intransportation. Yet, these injury figures underestimate vehicle traffic harm. Forthe latter statistic of 972 BC children injured in 2005, the ICBC usedpublicly available police-reported data. In contrast, figures that werequested from ICBC indicate that approximately 2,000 BC children aged 5to 13 were injured (4) in motor vehicle collisions in 2005. Thus, thevehicle insurance-reported injury numbers were more than twice thepolice reported, publicly available injury figures for the same group inthe same time period. Complex interagency relations and underreportingby police of low-severity reportable collisions contribute to systemicunderrepresentation of the extent of harm that traffic poses to childrenand others. In addition, the statistics do not reveal the number ofunreported collisions and injuries nor the near-misses (Adams 1993;Hillman, Adams, and Whitelegg 1990; Roberts, Smith, and Bryce 1995). Given problems in statistical reporting, even in the case of theless ambiguous category of death, it is not surprising that globalestimates of people killed annually on roads range from 1.2 to 5 million(Paterson 2007). The more widely reported conservative figure in itselfis extraordinarily high--far beyond the deaths of 9/11 and recentwars--and occurring year after year. Whatever the "real"numbers of traffic danger, countless lives are tragically lost orthreatened by auto-centered environments. In no other area of sociallife is this constant injury and loss of human life tolerated (Paterson2007). As part of this cultural and political tolerance, sociology andother cognate disciplines have shown little interest in focusing ontraffic safety, despite the fact that it raises intriguing theoretical,moral, political, and empirical questions. In focusing on elementary school traffic safety, we are exploringquestions about the reality of risk and the discursive constructions andpractices of protecting children in auto-centered societies. The realityof traffic risk--which is no more evident than in the simple but tellinggesture of a parent grabbing their child's hand at anintersection--is forever present in the street mobility of urbanchildren in western and increasingly nonwestern environments. (5) Thisgesture also illustrates the politics of responsibility that is deeplyembedded in automobilized societies that privilege cars before kids inwhich the organization of mobility entitles cars to dominate roads andconstructs parents and children as responsible for their traffic safety.While traffic safety practices by children and their parents/guardiansare successful most of the time, they require intense attention,organization, and vigilance. These efforts, while creating an"illusion of safety," obscure the risks of automobilizedenvironments and the politics of traffic safety that hold parentsaccountable. Traffic "risks" are not just a question of calculablenumbers; they are potential threats that are almost limitless aroundcar-saturated streets, especially in the case of children'ssafekeeping. As Thomsen (2005) argues, parental worries about trafficrisks are highly interpreted, complex social phenomena, based on publicinformation, mobility environment, personal history, and understandingsof the "good parent." Parental worries, which containpreconceptions about "risk," are variable according toparents' material conditions, access to mobilities, and multiplesituations as drivers and nondrivers. Yet, in neglecting to focus ontraffic safety practices, sociology as a discipline naturalizes andnormalizes them, even as they are the result of conflicting andcontradictory discourses and disciplinary technologies, negotiated inspecific social contexts that are increasingly organized around theautomobile. In our ongoing ethnographic case study, (6) we are focusing ontraffic safety practices during the journey to and from school and atthe highly contested site of the "school gate." It is at thissite where cars, children, parents, patrols, police, and schoolpersonnel congregate at the beginning and end of the school day andwhere school traffic safety programs attempt to organize the "freefor all" of colliding mobilities. Our preliminary analysis showsthat in creating an "illusion of safety," school trafficsafety is a complex system involving an array of programs and actors,including school and city personnel who struggle to negotiatechildren's safe mobility as pedestrians, cyclists, bus riders, orcar passengers. School traffic safety programs and practices, whichexist within a discursive and political context that relies onindividuals to adjust to automobility rather than the other way around,contribute to a less than ideal level of safety around schools, even asthey demobilize children by removing them from the roads. For all theattention to traffic safety measures observed around schools, they arefar from resolved. Representing society's tolerance for trafficrisks, governing authorities--municipal, provincial, and national--donot provide the political framework and necessary resources forchallenging the automobility system. In this article, we show how thissocial context, which privileges the automobile, fails to adequatelysupport school traffic safety programs. As a theoretical context to our ethnographic study, this articlebriefly discusses the critical scholarly literature that analyzes theautomobility system, the centrality of mobilities in social life, andparental chauffeuring of children to various activities includingschools. By using a local Canadian example, Vancouver, BC, we thenillustrate how the foundations of traditional school traffic safetymeasures reflect a social privileging of the automobile and a politicsof responsibility that focuses on individualized practices. We nextexamine recent public health and environmental efforts to resurrect theact of walking or biking to school. We show how these initiativesinteract with traditional traffic safety measures and maintain thepolitics of individualized responsibility, while also possiblyovershadowing traffic safety concerns. Finally, in discussing sucheducational issues as diversity and school choice, we argue that policyneeds to recognize the centrality of mobility in schooling. CRITICAL STUDIES OF AUTOMOBILITY AND TRAFFIC SAFETY Safeguarding children's mobility is inherent to the system ofautomoBility and auto-centered space. Automobility in Urry's (2004)definition consists of "the self-organizing, self-generating,non-linear world-wide system of ears, car-drivers, roads, petroleumsupplies, and many novel objects, technologies, and signs" (p. 27).In becoming the dominant mode of transportation, the automobile hasedged out other forms of mobility, such as public transit, bicycling,walking, as well as playing on the streets, thereby ensuring theirsubstandard status, and preempting the development of mobilityalternatives (see Dennis and Urry 2009, for a discussion of postcarmobilities). This structure of mobilities, of "autohegemony,"is not simply the result of the self-expanding automobility system. Itis also the result of concrete decisions and powerful politicalstruggles that "favour... automobility over its alternatives"(Paterson 2007:26). (7) The traffic safety industry--and its specialized experts, knowledgesystems, and safety programs--has addressed important issues anddeveloped useful safety devices and technologies for dealing withtraffic, but the measures are not immune from the social context ofvalues and politics that sustain the automobility system. In promotingtraffic safety, experts and programs generally focus on eithertechnological fixes or the modification of individual behavior thattarget the individual road user as responsible for safety (Freund andMartin 1997). (8) As critics point out, this individualistic focus,which ignores larger systemic issues, is unable to challenge the socialorganization of mobility that gives priority to the automobile, createscar dependency and reduces the possibility of developing alternatives tothe antomobilization of society (Freund and Martin 2007; Gusfield 1981;McLaren 2007; World Health Organization and World Bank 2004). Inaddition, this individualistic focus obscures the vast"autonetwork" of "accident-workers [that] cleanse theroad, repair the car, heal the victims and lock up irresponsibledrivers--suggesting that afterwards driving has become safe"(Beckmann 2004:95). Beckmann argues that automobility "works"because the social organization of road accidents denies the risks ofdriving and aims to reconstruct the "illusion of safety." Indrawing on Smith (1984), he argues that: The textual representations produced by professionals within the'accident reconstruction industry' can be seen as pivotalelements in the 'textually mediated social organisation' ...of accidents. The discourses that evolve from such textual mediation ofaccidents intersect with dominant forms of mobility governance, whichaim to smooth out and accelerate traffic as well as foster automobility.(Beckmann 2004:95) Countless, everyday traffic safety practices contribute toautomobility's "illusion of safety." With the expansionof car dominance on the roads, children's use and access to thatspace has declined; it has become highly monitored and shaped byguardians, programs, experts, laws, and disciplinary technologies. Whilescholars have long recognized children's precarious position incar-dominated environments as motor vehicles have taken over their playspaces (Freund and Martin 1993; Lynd and Lynd 1929), they have onlyrarely explored the significance of this phenomenon for the constructionof childhood and parenthood. (9) With growing traffic that makes roadsmore dangerous, children have few avenues in urban spaces forexploration and playing on their own. Parents compensate onchildren's behalf by withdrawing them from public space, escortingthem in private cars (despite their dangers for occupants), or confiningthem to the private home (Adams 1993). Children become"bystanders" on streets (Jain 2004), (10) which in effectdemobilizes childhood. Equally important, parenthood becomes constitutedwith safeguarding children in traffic-appropriated streets (which varyconsiderably according to neighborhood, car density, income levels,parenting cultures, access to mobilities, and so forth). Despite the fact that mobilities play a key role in children'sand parents' lives, research has only begun to focus on howchildren move around. Recent studies suggest that parents areincreasingly chauffeuring children to school, to activities and to otherchildren's homes (Collins and Kearns 2005; Fotel and Thomsen 2004;Hillman et al. 1990). Research shows that parents who chauffeur theirchildren to school are primarily concerned about "trafficdanger" (while ironically contributing to congestion and traffic)(Hillman et al. 1990). Other research contends that the majority ofparents drive their children to school for fear of "strangerdanger" and that fear of traffic is secondary (Joshi and MacLean1995). In either case, in their mobility care, parents are caught in anever-spiraling contradiction of creating traffic, while trying toprotect their children from it. They are also caught in the constantcontradiction that, whereas driving children to school may appear safer,it is likely to be more dangerous than letting them walk (Granville etal. 2002). Moreover, parents must continually negotiate what it means tobe a "good parent" in specific and changing circumstances, forexample, in accommodating their children as they grow up and demand moreindependence. In addition, several studies note that chauffeuring is a highlygendered activity, with mothers as the primary drivers. Sheller (2004)writes that "the 'family car' is closely integrated intodaily routines and supports feelings associated with taking care ofloved ones, as well as the sense of liberation afforded to women"(p. 231). In other words, cars can become "repositories fortreasured offspring and devices for demonstrating love, practicing care,performing gender" (p. 232). Indeed, it can be argued that"hypermobility" has come to construct the "automobilemother" in cardriven societies as the enactment of the "goodmother" (Murray 2008). These studies suggest that parentalchauffeuring to and from school occurs for complex reasons, includingspecific cultural ideas about mothering, which are also linked to timeand work demands, and to the negotiation of risk landscapes (Dowling2000; Murray 2008; Schwanen 2007). Parents, however, do not only chauffeur their children to school.Other parental mobility strategies include escorting their children asthey walk, bicycle, or take the bus. In examining the innovative,school-based initiative of the walking school bus in New Zealand,Collins and Kearns (2005) and Kearns and Collins (2006) have shown howthis program--that involves parent volunteers walking with groups ofchildren to school--has social, health, and environmental, as well as,safety benefits. The authors examine the ways that the walking schoolbus both challenges and sustains the automobility system and thecorresponding constructions of childhood and parenthood (see alsoCollins, Bean, and Kearns 2009). Similarly, our research focuses on children's mobility to andfrom the school site and within the context of automobility. Instead ofconcentrating on one particular form of mobility, such as parentalescorting, however, our study examines the diverse school-journeystrategies that families with elementary-school children adopt,including parent (or guardian) chauffeuring/escorting, and childrentraveling unescorted by adults to school. We also focus on the congestedand contested elementary school site, especially the school entrance,where car and noncar mobilities often collide. In what follows, wecontextualize our study by examining how school traffic safety programsstruggle with governing structures that limit resources andindividualize responsibility, while privileging automobility. Ouranalysis illustrates how educational and civic policy environments:provide only sporadic support to elementary school traffic safetyprograms, thereby ensuring their underdevelopment; construct schooltraffic safety as the primary responsibility of individuals,particularly children and parents; narrowly define school traffic safetyas a site-specific, rather than systemic, concern; and neglect toconnect the issue of mobility with broadly based educational objectives.As a result, institutional bodies, including the school board, citycommittees, provincial and national ministries, fail to consider howtheir own practices help to maintain the current structure of mobilitiesand its inherent dangers. SCHOOLING TRAFFIC SAFETY: THE FOUNDATION OF TRADITIONAL STRATEGIES Since the early twentieth century, communities have sought toestablish safe school travel routes and practices by developingcampaigns to train schoolchildren to patrol the safe passage of otherchildren (Canadian Automobile Association 2008; Damon 1958; Norton 2008)and by engineering the built environment to facilitate safer routes toschool (Appleyard 2003; McMillan 2005). Safety programs soon followedthe advent of the automobile. By 1913, New Jersey had establishedtraffic safety educational programs for all students (Crum 1913) and by1916 had organized school travel for young children under the protectionof older students in Newark (Damon 1958). Several cities in NorthAmerica claim to have developed the first School Safety Patrol in theearly 1920s. By that time the establishment of safety council patrolsacross many American cities indicates that organizing was significantand initially local in nature. The growing involvement of the AmericanAutomobile Association throughout the 1920s demonstrates the nationalimpact of its intent to shift responsibility for children's trafficsafety from the driver to the child pedestrian (Norton 2008). This shiftwas in keeping with the institutional framework of liability cases inthe United States, which early on primarily distributed blame to mothersand children for child deaths by automobiles, leaving drivers, except invery rare cases, unpunished (Jain 2004). In Canada, initial programs included the first Canadian AutomobileAssociation-sponsored school-safety patrol established in 1929 in QuebecCity (Canadian Automobile Association 2008) and Elmer the SafetyElephant curriculum which began in 1947 to supplement safety councilprograms across Canadian cities (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation1955). The Look Both Ways Club, a Canadian school-based program, wasadopted and popularized in Australia by 1930 and involved schools andservice groups (Boy Scouts, etc.) working in tandem to instillchildren's self-regulation of safe street crossing in urban areas.This program is another early example of a model that focused ondisciplining the body and the family rather than the automobile (Bonham2006). These programs were part of an historical and cultural shift thatled to the exclusion of children from significant swaths of public spaceand the appropriation of streets for automobile use (Jain 2004). Withinthe broad instituting of traffic safety practices and programs favoringautomobilized constructions of urban streets in the twentieth centurystands the case of the first Vancouver school traffic safety patrol,(11) which was formed in 1935 following the deaths of two schoolchildren(City of Vancouver 2009). Parent Parking Patrols appeared in Vancouverin 1994 shortly after its initial development in Edmonton, Alberta in1992 (Hoffman 1998). In Vancouver, school traffic safety programs are currentlysupported by the Vancouver School Board (VSB) and City of VancouverPolice Department and continue to rely on volunteer patrols to regulatetraffic and children's mobility. The programs however are sporadic,variable across schools, and operate within a conflicting context inwhich city-wide resources and governance are inadequate and pressures atthe school site are contradictory. Instead of employing a standardprogrammatic approach to school traffic safety at its 75 elementaryschools and 16 annexes, the VSB promotes traffic safety as asite-specific concern that individual schools can "choose" todevelop (depending on school administration, Parent Advisory Committees,parent volunteers, and so forth). Schools can utilize several types ofresources, such as patrol training through Vancouver Police, or materialor textual resources through provincial-based organizations, such as theBritish Columbia Automobile Association, Way to Go! program, or Hub forAction on School Transportation Emissions. In November 2008, 44Vancouver elementary schools operated school safety patrols and 33schools used parent-led patrols, representing respectively less thanhalf and about one-third of schools in the city (City of Vancouver2009). Only a minority of schools retain patrols from year to year,reflecting the lack of standardized approaches to school traffic safetyin Vancouver, despite the fact that most schools are accessed by cars,are surrounded by streets that serve as thoroughfares for cars, and aresometimes located on major arteries for cars, trucks, and buses. Basedon volunteers, parent patrols form and disband frequently (Key informantinterview 2007). One informant noted that time and work constraintslimit volunteerism and indicated that the role of parent patroller isstressful: [At] some schools you have a core group of parents who may startoff with very good intentions but as the weather changes or othercommitments come into their life, you know, they're not going to beout there on a regular basis. I think for some parents ... they aretrained as part of being a parent parking patrol, but the commentsI've heard from many of them is 'I don't need thisabuse.' (Key informant interview 2007) While parents negotiate a wide variety of sometimes, conflictingmobility strategies, verbal altercations between parent parkingpatrollers and drivers at the school gate are characteristic of thekinds of continuous challenges parent patrol volunteers and schooladministrators face. Information on the variable nature of Vancouver school trafficsafety programs has never been systematically gathered, in part due topersistent underfunding. Police (12) lack the staff required to annuallycollect data on these programs and their delivery and staffing areinsecure. Indeed, Vancouver Police Department funding cutbacks in 2003reduced the number of Safety and Education officers from three to one;by 2005 the Department had reinstated one of the School Safety PatrolOfficer positions (Key informant interview 2008). Likewise, City councildocuments, which tend to frame school traffic safety as a problem ofengineering and individual driving behavior, provide little informationon the status or activities of school traffic safety. But in keepingwith the wider context that is inattentive to school traffic safety, thedocumentation suggests that efforts to improve it are hampered byinadequate resources. For example, the minutes of a 2004 councilcommittee meeting note that a mother, whose child on the way to schoolwas seriously injured by a vehicle while in a crosswalk, requestedupgrades to crosswalks near the school to make children more visible todrivers (City of Vancouver 2004). We found, however, no indication infollowing documents that this request was addressed (or that crosswalksnear the school were improved). Documents do show that out of about 100requests for pedestrian signals each year, City of Vancouver Engineeringinstall only about 8 to 10 (City of Vancouver 2006a). With limitedresources and governance, it is difficult for improvements to occur andfor committees to follow-up on proposals and monitor their progress. Ourreview of engineering improvements around schools from 2003 to 2006indicates that Engineering Services reports remain the primary sourcefor information about addressing traffic safety around schools. To solvecontext-heavy problems associated with automobile dependence, the Citycounts on Engineering Services to manage problems on a limited budget.Despite more than seven decades of school traffic safety programs inVancouver, several factors, including the paucity of publicdocumentation, prevent the development of comprehensive protections tochildren in automobilized environments. In relying on traditional organizing of volunteer patrols, sporadicspeed and parking bylaw enforcement to control individual behavior, andon occasional "hard measures" involving engineering planningand road redesign, the City is unable to consider the system ofautomobility and its failures. Measures are piece-meal, with littlefocused follow-up; they rely on individuals to enact traffic safety;they short-circuit the development of broad policy responses to protectschoolchildren from traffic harm. This limited approach in thefoundations to school traffic safety continues to be reproduced in localinitiatives that draw on new global campaigns that seek to reduceparental chauffeuring and increase children's mobility in the roadenvironment. As with the traditional school traffic safety measures, thenew campaigns are underfunded and underresourced; they leave it up toindividuals and groups to "choose" to adopt the programs andto assume responsibility for their enactment. While these new campaignsinclude traffic safety, they also run the danger of overshadowing thisissue with other health and environmental concerns. RECENT CIVIC AND NATIONAL INITIATIVES PROMOTING SAFE AND ACTIVETRAVEL Amidst recent public concern in Vancouver and BC that parents wereincreasingly chauffeuring their children to school, and thereby creatinghealth (e.g., obesity), environmental (e.g., air pollution), and safetyproblems at the school gate, provincial, and civic initiatives, such asthe Way to Go! and One Day One School programs, have sought to encouragemore active travel to school. In drawing on internationally developedprograms (IWALK and Active and Safe Routes to School [A&SRTS]),these local initiatives target both schools and parents for education onsafety and mobility choices. Established in 1997, the provincial Way to Go! program providedmaterial resources and consulting to schools that wanted to improvetraffic safety and increase alternative forms of mobility (O'Brienand Kowey 2000). This program was developed in response to a Vancouver1994 Trip Diary Survey that revealed a growing use of the family vehiclefor school trips. Both 1999 and 2004 Trip Diary figures indicated thatapproximately 42 percent of children (K-12) were chauffeured to schoolby private vehicle (City of Vancouver 2002; Rock 2005). City discussionthat proposed a no-idling bylaw in Vancouver similarly acknowledged thecontinual and heavy use of the private vehicle for school travel (Cityof Vancouver 2006c). While the Way to Go! program highlights schooltravel safety foremost, it also emphasizes children's health anddevelopment, climate change, and air pollution to promote active oralternative travel to school, paralleling the international initiativesof IWALK and A&SRTS in developing community-level advocacy ofalternative mobility. In recognition that most Vancouver elementarystudents live within walking distance of their school (City of Vancouver2007a), programming materials from various sources (VSB, Way to Go!,City of Vancouver) continue to showcase the need for special days,weeks, or months each year in which children walk or bike to school.According to estimates, the number of Canadian children walking orbiking to school on the designated Walk to School Day grew exponentiallyfrom 16,000 in 1998 to 100,000 in 1999 (Green Communities Canada 2007).Participation in the International Walk to School Month has expanded toinclude 42 countries involving several million children in 2007 (IWALK2007). By 2007, approximately half of BC schools had registered forparticipation in International Walk to School Week (Program coordinatorinterview 2008). Such participation illustrates a wide-spread community interest insafe and active school travel programs, but these programs are hinderedby limited or retracted funding, as evidenced in BC by the Way to Go!program that lost its support in June 2008 from the Auto Plan BrokersRoad Safety Program. (13) Way to Go! no longer exists even as aWeb-based resource. In addition, while many schools have requested"safe and active travel" resources, (14) we do not know howparent organizers take up the materials and translate them into trafficsafety practices. Our interviews with parents reveal their strongconcerns that traffic safety infrastructure is underdeveloped in theface of increased traffic volume in their neighborhoods. In recountingher discussions with other parents about their children's abilityto regularly travel to school independently, one mother linkedincreasing parental protectiveness to obvious traffic challenges: If they're on the main streets you're worried abouttraffic and the roadways, that they're crossing those roads. Someof the areas don't have lights, or they just have to cross,it's just a stop sign, and so you have to make sure thatthey're looking and the car driver's looking. I would thinkthat a lot of kids, you're concerned about their safety a lotlonger than you would of, who knows, maybe a few years ago. Just itseems it's more traffic and busier. (Interview 2008) Parent narratives highlight how discursive practices to promoteschool traffic safety contradict lived experience in negotiatinghome-to-school travel that has become highly organized aroundautomobiles. The persistent high rates of parental chauffeuring inVancouver reflect limits to what local organizations can achieve in theabsence of broader school traffic safety policies that would challengethe privileging of the car. In falling to develop comprehensive policies to tackleauto-dominance, the City of Vancouver itself is hampered in its aims topromote environmental sustainability, greening of the city, and reducingcitizens' reliance on cars. In 1995, Vancouver's CityPlanVision indicated that it "supports the regional transportationobjective of placing a greater emphasis on transit, walking and cyclingahead of cars to slow traffic growth in neighbourhoods and theenvironment" (City of Vancouver 2007c:2). This Vision has expandedpublic dialogue across Vancouver on such concerns as neighborhoodtraffic calming and greenway development. Yet, CityPlan's promotionof walking, biking, and transit use continues without adequate focus ondifferential contexts and populations, as in the case of the city'spedestrian studies, which focus on commercial and geographicallyspecific areas, taking little account of pedestrianism among children.The city's more recent Community Climate Change Action Plan,approved March 2005, on the other hand, does incorporate a focus onchildren and schools. It includes goals to "increase the supply oftransit, cycling, and walking infrastructure and services" and to"enhanc[e] alternative transportation programs at school"(City of Vancouver 2005:37). The plan contains the school-based pilot program, One Day OneSchool, which grew out of partnerships between the City of VancouverSustainability office and City engineers, the Way to Go! program, andVSB Facilities. Beginning with 10 schools, this program alms to decreaseparent chauffeuring to school and reduce the number of kilometers drivenby 20 percent within two years, with the objective to expand to allVancouver schools to reduce Vancouver's greenhouse gases by anestimated 5,000 tons annually by 2012 (City of Vancouver 2007a). Theprogram utilized student travel mode surveys completed in class, parentsurveys, best routes to school mapping, and bicycle training forintermediate-level students. Plans were also under way to distributesmall grants to participating schools and to include five more schoolsin the second year of the program (City of Vancouver 2007a). Thecity's yearly funding commitments for the One Day One School pilotare reported to be $44,000 for each year (City of Vancouver 2006b). (15)Outcome measures to assess the stated goals of improving students'fitness levels and reducing obesity have not yet been clearly developed.The One Day Website discloses the general, and somewhat ambitious, goalsof the One Day One School initiative, stating "One Day ...Vancouver's schools will be the cleanest, greenest, healthiest inthe world" (One Day 2008). Albeit at a preliminary stage, thisprogram so far has not focused comprehensively on safety issues aroundchildren's travel. If it supports traffic safety priorities, theOne Day model still continues policies that rely on schools' andparents' time resources and intensive strategies of childprotection on streets. Whether or not programs emphasize health andenvironment over traffic safety, the City of Vancouver's increasedinvolvement with issues of sustainability so far involves onlyshort-term funding commitments for developing alternative school travelprograms. This municipal level of poorly resourced, school traffic safetyprograms suggests a deeply embedded cultural and political tolerance forchild traffic injury and deaths that is reproduced nationally. Thenational-level A&SRTS program (16) also promotes active schooltravel, reaching parents through their children in primarily focusing onissues of health and environment. The fact that this program seeks tosupport coordination across provinces and municipalities provides hopefor alliances and more comprehensive policies. Recently school travelcoordinators from several provinces have partnered with the goal toestablish school travel planning (STP) in all elementary schools by2015. Modeled after the U.K.'s mandatory STP initiative, thisnational pilot program seeks to promote STP to parents and authoritiesby emphasizing the issues of obesity and climate change. Althoughfederal bodies, such as Transport Canada and the Public Health Agency ofCanada, have recently promised funding for a few A&SRTS pilots, aConfidential source (2008) argues that programs need broader and moresustained, coordinated and budgeted funding commitments from federal,provincial, and municipal governments, as well as, provincial educationpolicy guidelines that necessitate school board compliance. Canada hasonly ever had pilots and no permanent budgeted national programsaddressing active school travel; neither have federal authoritiesprovided statistics or other information about how children travel toschool (Confidential source 2007). A&SRTS and similar initiativeshave not obtained funding for their envisioned growth and the work ofnonprofit organizations in this area remains distinctly underrecognizedby governing authorities. A program coordinator (Interview 2007)articulated the question, "is it right for non profits to struggleto get funding to examine this large issue affecting society?" andcalls for formal and concerted attention to the issue of active and safetravel for school-aged children. Since civic and national programs have increasingly contained themultiple goals of health, environmental sustainability and trafficsafety, it is possible that by joining forces these diverse concernswill help to mobilize resources and challenge the auto-dominance ofstreets. The danger exists, however, that traffic safety is beingconflated with the other goals. In drawing on the steady generation ofstudies linking the school journey with health and environmentalconcerns, (17) promotional materials tend to foreground active travelrather than safety; reliance continues on individuals to enact lifestylechanges and on parent volunteers to oversee school travel events. Thestress of experts on climate and health issues holds the potential toeclipse recognition of schools' and parents'automobility-related safety concerns. While various and sometimes, interlocking, programs can improvechildren's travel safety to and from school, if civic and othergoverning authorities fail to develop comprehensive programs, theyundermine or even contradict traffic safety initiatives. In the nextsection, we identify two challenges facing local school traffic safetyprograms: Vancouver's diverse school population (e.g.,multiculturally, socially, and economically); and the province'srecent school choice legislation. These educational issues illustratethe ways in which mobility is central to schooling and how currentpolicies fail to recognize the automobility system as inherentlydangerous and demobilizing to children. EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND MOBILITY The Vancouver School District is described as being "among themost diverse and complex of public school systems in Canada" andthe district "includes some of the most affluent and impoverishedurban neighbourhoods in the country" (VSB 2006:11). In Vancouver,language diversity has historically been a key feature of the city, yetthe limited availability of specific language supports in school trafficprograms works against promoting equitable and safe travel for children.School traffic safety texts and brochures are a case in point. Duringinterview discussions parents and others have reported a need fortranslation resources to ensure information is communicated to allparents and caregivers. One school administrator noted that the SchoolBoard has made standardized translated traffic safety informationavailable to administrators for some time and they on occasion sharebasic translated documents; however, it is left to school staff toretrieve, utilize, and shape such supports to their needs (Interview2007). Such an approach does not recognize school disparities and variedabilities to take advantage of the translated documents to promotetraffic safety. Census figures also indicate disparate economic and socialdifferences between many neighborhoods in Vancouver. Persons of lowersocioeconomic status typically live in the eastern neighborhoods whilethose of higher socioeconomic status typically occupy the westernsection of the city (City of Vancouver 2007b). These differences arelikely to have a complex relationship to school travel and trafficsafety (e.g., access to a vehicle; proximity of schools to majorthoroughfares; traffic congestion at the school gate; parentalvolunteerism). Little research, however, has investigated how markers ofsocial distance are related to mobility, and how educational policiesthat ignore this relationship might undermine school traffic safetypractices. In addition, specific provincial educational policies that fail totake account of mobility directly contradict efforts to go green and toreduce school travel. For example, BC Bill 34 (2002), which encouragesthe development of a quasi-market in public education (Fallon andPaquette 2008), emphasizes parental school choice, including the rightof students to attend schools in any catchment area in BC (subject tospace availability). This policy--as well as other legislation thatencourages the development of "independent" or privateschools--in effect, disrupts the city's traditionalschool/neighborhood relationship, disregards inequalities betweenneighborhoods, and the impact of the policies on school travel. Whilethe VSB (2004) notes that "most requests for cross boundaries arewithin the geographical region of the home, and not from east to westschools" (p. 3), others point out that the migration of studentsfrom east to west is a concern: "20 percent of East Sideschool-aged youth seem to be leaving their community to attend school,compared to 3.5 percent on the West Side (McMahon 2007:np)." (18)Research has not adequately considered the influence of provinciallegislation on school traffic safety and related health initiatives.(19) With the "mobility turn" in social theory (Hannam,Sheller, and Urry 2006), research needs to question educationalpolicy's concerted inattention to school travel. CONCLUSION Our exploration of school traffic safety programs in Vancouver,Canada illustrates that such programs have a long but uneven historycharacterized by governing authorities that fail to provide stablefunding, adequate resources, or comprehensive coordination. Within thecontext of automobility, these programs assume a politics ofresponsibility that largely targets children and parents for trafficsafekeeping while leaving intact the privileging of auto-dominance. Thisindividualistic approach to school traffic safety is reproduced in newinitiatives, which accentuate the added dimensions of health and theenvironment that may overshadow traffic safety concerns. In addition,new initiatives are often piloted without long-term funding commitmentand run up against countervailing trends of parental chauffeuring andschool choice policies. Schooling traffic safety requires attention tothe possible contradictions in governance that ignore socially systemicissues that shape mobility practices. Our case study, which focuses on aspecific large city, poses questions for other locations, includingsmall towns and rural areas. The broader theoretical question that needsto be raised is how school traffic safety programs discipline parents,children, and schools to accommodate automobile-dominated roadways andurban design and how they might help to mobilize challenges to them. References Adams, J. 1993. "Risk Compensation and the Problem ofMeasuring Children's Independent Mobility and Safety on theRoads." Pp. 44-58 in Children, Transport and the Quality of Life,edited by M. Hillman. London, UK: Policy Studies Institute. Appleyard, B.S. 2003. "Planning Safe Routes to School."Planning 69:34-37. AuCoin, K. 2005. Children and Youth as Victims of Violent Crime.Ottawa: Juristat: Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. Beckmann, J. 2004. 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'Oh No YouCan't': Children and Parents' Understandings ofKids' Competence to Negotiate Public Space Safely." Antipode29:65-89. Vancouver School Board (VSB). 2004. "Committee I--ManagementCoordinating." Report to the Board. Meeting Minutes. September 27. Vancouver School Board (VSB). 2006. "District Plan 2006/2007:For Student Engagement, Learning and Development." October 31. World Health Organization and World Bank. 2004. World Report onRoad Traffic Injury Prevention. Geneva: World Health Organization. SYLVIA PARUSEL AND ARLENE TIGAR MCLAREN Simon Fraser University (1.) Thanks to Jim Conley for these calculations. (2.) In Canada, child homicides are committed primarily by familymembers or caregivers (AuCoin 2005). (3.) Of these, 921 children were "seriously injured."Transport Canada (2006) defines serious injury as an injury requiringadmission to a hospital. (4.) ICBC is the source of differing statistics on child motorvehicle injury in BC. The lower BC child injury figures (aged 5 to 13)are taken from ICBC statistics available to the general public based onpolicereported collisions only. Our request in 2007 to ICBC forinformation on motor vehicle injury in 2005 of BC children aged 5 to 13yielded comparatively higher injury numbers. (5.) In particular, countries like China and India are increasinglyconsuming cars and developing car industries (Martin 2009). (6.) Our multimethod study involves several scales of analysis andincludes in-depth interviews with parents, school teachers andadministrators, school board staff, traffic safety program coordinatorsand agency personnel, as well as documents and data from variousagencies. (7.) For further discussion and debate, see for example Bohm et al.(2006) and Conley and McLaren (2009). (8.) For example, recent task force recommendations adopted byCanada's Road Safety Vision 2010 target the individual andtechnological control of high-risk behavior for improving road safety(McLaren 2007). (9.) Social geographers have contributed significantly to thisanalysis (e.g., Collins and Kearns 2005; Kearns and Collins 2006;Valentine 1997}. (10.) See Norton's (2008) historical analysis that shows thepolitics involved in the removal of pedestrians from American cityroads, for example, in the construction of the "jay walker." (11.) In 1953, the program's name changed from School BoyPatrol to School Safety Patrol when girls were allowed to participate aspatrollers (City of Vancouver 2009). (12.) Police officers assist with the enforcement of school trafficsafety rules and City bylaws by visiting schools, monitoring programs,communicating with repeat bylaw offenders, training student and parentpatrol volunteers, et cetera. (13.) This program was funded by the ICBC, a provincial Crowncorporation providing vehicle insurance and licensing. (14.) By 1999, 600 schools throughout BC had requested Way to Go!resource kits (O'Brien and Kowey 2000). (15.) The funding amount listed here excludes the unknownadditional proportional costs related to engineers' andprofessionals' salaries. (16.) Originating in Odanse, Denmark in the late 1970s, theA&SRTS model sought to investigate the relationship betweenchildren's travel routes and traffic danger. Evaluation ofsubsequent traffic environment improvements indicated a significantreduction in child traffic injury and deaths (Nielsen 1990). Cooper etal. (2005) also found that this model used in school travel improvedphysical activity. (17.) See, for example, Sallis and Glanz (2006). (18.) The majority of commuters entering the city approach from theeastern boundaries. Certainly, those with the most resources inVancouver appear rather insulated from the worst effects ofautomobilization. (19.) As of September 2006, 53 Vancouver public elementary schoolsand annexes were participating in ActNow BC Initiatives. The programincludes ActianSehools BC, and ActNow BC for Students which utilizeschool environments and aim to increase students' daily exerciseand to encourage healthy eating habits. Our first thanks go to the participants who informed our study. Weare grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ofCanada for funding this research. We thank Ralph Matthews, Jim Conley,and three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on anearlier draft of this article. Arlene Tigar McLaren, Sociology & Anthropology, Simon FrasarUniversity, AQ 5054, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6.E-mail: mclaren@sfu.ca