September 28th, 2022

Dear Howard Robertson Families,

Student Transportation Services of Waterloo Region strives to positively influence children’s lives by coordinating their safe and efficient movement between home and school in support of their educational journey. In an effort to support students living in the walk zone, STSWR offers School Travel Planning services that work with your school board, area municipalities, and parents like you to make active travel to school like walking, cycling and scooting to school a safer and easier choice. 

School Travel Planning is best delivered after collecting specific data about each individual school since school travel situations differ from one site to the next. We use two types of surveys to get a clearer picture of why and how students travel to school, neither of which asks for personal information. Combined answers will be used for program planning at your school and the regional level, and may be shared with Green Communities Canada for province-wide reviews of school travel patterns. 

This information is especially important as your School Travel Planning committee will be working on improvements to the school journey. Some of the great things that committees like the one at your school have been able to accomplish or influence with this support at other schools include:

 

  • Inspiring walking events
  • “Drive to Five” campaigns disbursing traffic from the school site
  • Walking maps
  • Trailblazer training and other road safety education
  • Traffic calming measures like pedestrian islands and crossovers
  • Improved railway crossings

 

  • The BikeWalkRoll Survey

 

What is the survey about?

In order to better plan for the ways students travel for the school journey, we need to track how students are travelling to school. We use the BikeWalkRoll survey at bikewalkroll.org in class to ask students to raise their hands if they arrived by walking, cycling, rolling (includes skateboards, scooters and wheelchairs), or by car or bus; and similarly how they plan to get home. 

The BikeWalkRoll application records this information online and assigns a “score” to show how the modes measure up. This information is made publicly available on the bikwalkroll.org website, where you will be able to check your school and classroom scores and even compare them to other schools across the world.

When and how will the survey happen?

We will complete the survey in all classrooms once per day for a one-week period in October, in February, and again in April in order to see how transportation patterns change over the course of the year. We only record the tally of students who use each mode of transportation.

 

Howard Robertson Staff and STSWR