Cycling Ireland president Ciaran Cannon believes perceptions around safety levels for cyclists on the roads is behind a collapse in the number of children cycling to school in Ireland
Cycling Ireland president Ciaran Cannon has pointed to a general collapse in cycling among school children, saying it had come about because most people were too fearful due to the safety environment on the roads.
He was speaking after the launch of research by Red Click-Ireland Thinks that revealed almost 80 per cent of children never cycled to school. And 48 per cent of respondents cited safety on the roads as a reason.
Other reasons were also mentioned including 54 per cent of respondents saying distance to school was an issue while 41 per cent said school bags were too heavy to carry on a bike.
Weather was cited by 39 per cent of respondents and almost half, 49 per cent, of parents of secondary school students said school uniforms were not suitable for cycling.
A lack of confidence was mentioned by 46 per cent of parents and 42 per cent said the impact cycling would have on personal appearance was an issue.
Cannon told The Claire Byrne Show there had been a very significant drop in the number of children cycling to school in recent years and he believed safety was at the heart of it.
“A secondary school child should be easily able to cycle the three to five kilometres every morning and every evening,” he said.
“There’s no reason why they shouldn’t, other than the fact that their parents have serious safety concerns around that actual route to school.
“If you look about 40 years ago, we had one in four of our secondary school children cycling to school – that’s now about one in 30.”
He said there had been an “absolute generational collapse in children’s independent mobility”.
And while 70 per cent of parents said cycling would be their preferred way for their kids getting to school, only five per cent of children cycled every day.
While it was “simply no safe” for children to cycle to school at present, he believed things are changing.
Cycling Ireland is reaching 43,000 children each year with its Cycle Right training scheme, helping prepare them for the roads, for example.
“The Government has developed the ‘safe routes to school’ programme, which essentially works with the school principals, the school board of management and the local authority,” he said.
“(They) do an assessment of a school environment and the routes to and from that school, from the immediate hinterland. That’s beginning to work.
“But the problem is there are about 4,000 schools in Ireland right now between primary and post-primary and just over 500 schools are engaged in that programme.
“So, we urgently need to scale up that; we need to invest in it and it’s a really, really sound investment in our children’s health and well-being.”