A ticket to a sustainable future for the Walking School Bus programme: An evaluation of the long-term durability of the initiative within the Christchurch context

In September 2000, Christchurch’s first official Walking School Buses were established at three local schools as part of a pilot project conducted by the City Council. This concept involves a parent walking along a set route to school, collecting other children from stops along the way. The project was part of a wider international response to recent trends which had witnessed a dramatic increase in the proportion of children being driven to school, at the expense of more active and sustainable modes, such as walking. Ten weeks after the Buses were introduced, a formal evaluation was performed to determine the immediate success of the project. Since then, the programme expanded to involve 15 schools by mid-2003, but no further monitoring appears to have been administered. Consequently, the current status of the Christchurch Walking School Buses is largely unknown. The main objective of this thesis was therefore to address this need for evaluation by examining the sustainability of the Walking School Bus programme in Christchurch over time, and determining what primary factors influence the durability of the initiative. A variety of textual, oral and observational research techniques were employed for this study, but interviews with the parent co-ordinators of current and former Buses provided the main source of information. The results from this research indicate that the Christchurch Walking School Bus programme is suffering a significant decline, as almost half of the Buses have stopped functioning over time. Almost a quarter of the discontinued routes never actually began operating, while another quarter collapsed within a year and a half of their initiation. Parents involved had experienced numerous difficulties, but the main problems were a lack of volunteers to share their workload, and insufficient ongoing support from the school or Council. In order to enhance the durability of the initiative, the City Council need to restructure the organisational processes involved to ensure that parents receive all the assistance necessary to sustain their Buses in the long-term.