Bicycles Offered to Encourage Kids to Walk

Hoping to reduce traffic congestion around schools, the city donated bicycles and helmets to three elementary schools Thursday that will be offered as rewards for children who walk or carpool to class.

Officials from the Bay Laurel, Chaparral and Lupin Hill schools received three of the bikes at the Las Virgenes Unified School District office building. Throughout the school year, each campus will hold drawings to award the bicycles to students who walk or carpool to class. Six bicycles will be donated to each of the three schools.

Last September, the city distributed maps illustrating safe routes kids could use to walk to class at the three schools, said Robert B. Yalda, the city’s director of transportation/intergovernmental relations.

The suggested routes were based on a six-month study of the areas around the school done by the city with help from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Yalda said. Recommended streets have sidewalks, marked crosswalks, enlarged signs with reflective material and increased visibility, Yalda said.

“This is not just to give away bikes, it’s to promote safety in schools,” he said. “It sets the standards for children, who will be the future drivers in the community. Respect for law and order is a key issue here.”

The bicycles and helmets, worth about $1,800, were funded through donations from city business owners, Yalda said. Since 1997, the city has donated 38 bikes to city schools, he said.

Yalda said the city began to study traffic around schools because parents had to wait up to 10 minutes in traffic near the schools. Parents also made unsafe maneuvers or parked illegally while dropping kids off, he said. In October, sheriff’s deputies began to occasionally videotape parents taking their children to schools. Some were fined or received warning letters, Yalda said.

Some of the congestion near schools was caused by too many parents driving their children to school at the same time, Yalda said.

In response, the city started a program to award bikes to students who arrive early and it also helped pay for supervisors at the schools half an hour before class, he said, allowing parents to drop children off earlier. Those measures have eased traffic delays, Yalda said.

At Chaparral Elementary, to which students are not bused, 100 of the 600 students now arrive at school half an hour before class, said Principal Mary Sistrunk.

“Parents saw they could drop [kids] off faster and earlier,” Sistrunk said. “Last year the point was for them to come early. Now we want to encourage as many kids as possible to walk to school.”