Radical Italian Plan Confronts Obesity, Global Warming By (Gasp!) Having Kids Walk To School

[hatrack]

LECCO, Italy — Each morning, about 450 students travel along 17 school bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this lakeside city at the southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school buses. In 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local traffic jams and — most important — a rise in global greenhouse gases abetted by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a retro-radical concept: children should walk to school.

They set up a piedibus (literally foot-bus in Italian) — a bus route with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a mix of paid staff members and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests lead lines of walking students along Lecco’s twisting streets to the schools’ gates, Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands.

At the Carducci School, 100 children, or more than half of the students, now take walking buses. Many of them were previously driven in cars. Giulio Greppi, a 9-year-old with shaggy blond hair, said he had been driven about a third of a mile each way until he started taking the piedibus. “I get to see my friends and we feel special because we know it’s good for the environment,” he said.

Although the routes are each generally less than a mile, the town’s piedibuses have so far eliminated more than 100,000 miles of car travel and, in principle, prevented thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the air, Dario Pesenti, the town’s environment auditor, estimates.

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/world/europe/27bus.html?_r=1

[BlooInBloo]

1. !Que horror! Won't somebody think of the little walking pork chops!

:rofl:

I like the environmental aspect, though.

[Double T]

2. No bus expense and healthier kids. Americans would never hear of such things.

Now please pass the potato chip bag and the game controller before the bus pulls up right in front of our door.

[BeFree]

3. Good idea

Thing about our big yellow busses.... built like semis and made to top out at 60-70mph when they are meant to be local backstreet runners, seems a bit too much. And why aren't electric? With a top speed of say 30 mph and only needed twice a day, it seems we could revamp our fleet to make it far greener.

And let the kids walk more, definitely.

[angstlessk]

4. hell, I walked a mile to and fro in elementary school and was still fat

I recon I worked up an appetite?

[excess_3]

5. who wants to be sued, when some kid has a heart attack? n/t