Ian Thomas

If you’re working to make it easier for children to walk and bike to school in your community, Ian Thomas is a name that you should know! Ian is currently serving as the Executive Director of the Pedestrian and Pedaling Network of Columbia, Missouri (PedNet). As he prepares to step down from this position to run for the Fourth Ward seat in City Council in Columbia, MO, this April, we spoke with him recently about the lessons that he learned in setting up the organization’s Walking School Bus program, a nationally-recognized Safe Routes to School success story.

Ian shared his personal goals for making active transportation a citywide priority, and shed light on how drastically people’s perceptions can change from just one generation to the next—and what those changes mean for physical infrastructure.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Walking School Bus Program PedNet runs in Columbia, MO, and how it has become so successful?

PedNet’s Walking School Bus program, which started in 2003 , is a component of our Safe Routes to School (SRTS) initiative [Editor's Note: you can read more about Walking School Bus creator David Engwicht here]. This started prior to federal legislation about SRTS, and at a time when there wasn’t much funding, but SRTS was a concept that was starting to catch on in Missouri. PedNet was a young organization then, focused on street design standards, or what are known now as complete streets. We wanted some encouragement programs that would get people out walking and biking as we were trying to work with the city to put in sidewalks and bike lanes, and wanted to address a couple of oft-repeated concerns that parents have about their children walking to school–mainly traffic danger and stranger danger.

If you do an analysis of those two things, you’ll find that the number of kids walking to school was about 50% in the 1960s, but now it’s more like 15%. That’s a pretty dramatic change in behavior over just one generation. One of the main differences is that there’s a lot more traffic on the roads today, and these roads are not designed with the pedestrian in mind, let alone children.

If you design a program so parents have faith in it, it is well run, and volunteers are trained, responsible, and reliable, then parents are extremely happy that their kids are walking to school because they get out and get exercise in the morning and in the afternoon. It’s more like when the parents were in school. My generation was among that 50% walking to school so it’s sort of a throwback. We developed our program in Columbia by recruiting adults, many of them college students. We designed the routes, advertised the program, got parents to sign their kids up, and took the volunteers through the walking routes to survey them. It’s become very popular in Columbia. Last school year we had about 500 kids participate.

You mentioned that prior to SRTS there wasn’t federal legislation in place to support this concept, and funding was hard to come by. What was the process of getting that legislation in place?

There were advocates at the national level, and Deb Hubsmith was really a leading light working in Washington DC with Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, the chair of the House Transportation Committee who was primarily responsible for the federal SRTS Program. Deb worked very closely with other national advocacy groups and they made a very good case for the health benefits, academic benefits, safety, and congestion benefits of Safe Routes to School. As a result, more than $600 million was provided for the program in the 2005 Federal Transportation Bill.

Most school districts don’t provide busing for kids who live less than a mile from school. Before we started the program, we did a survey in of parents that live within a one-mile radius of a randomly selected group of schools and found that of all the kids living within that radius, only about 25% of them were walking to school. We realized if we put in place a robust Walking School Bus program, we would eliminate a tremendous amount of traffic around these schools. Congestion and air pollution would be reduced as well.

We were able to present these benefits to parents, and the people and advocacy groups mentioned before were able to present them to legislators. There was broad support for the idea of allocating federal funds to promote walking to school through programs like the Walking School Bus and through engineering investments like putting in sidewalks, slowing down traffic, and adding crosswalks in school areas. The idea was that this would hopefully move us back toward 50% of kids walking to school again.

500 children participated in Columbia’s Walking School Bus program last year / Photo: MoBikeFed via Flickr

Can you speak to the benefits, and in some cases the necessity of coordinating with various organizations to make these programs a success?

Certainly for SRTS, having a strong and diverse partnership of stakeholders and organizations from different sectors has been extremely important. As an independent, non-profit organization, PedNet had to reach out and partner with the school district. While we weren’t asking the school district to implement the program itself, but we wanted their support, and the support of the parents. The district has been a really important partner, and in some parts of the country school districts are heading local SRTS programs. We’re trying to achieve that in Columbia and transfer the program to the school so that they run it with our help.

Other important partners have been the Public Health Department and the University of Missouri. We’ve worked very closely with the health department for a dozen years, not just on walking to school, but on building more accessible communities, trails, and promoting bus use. The University of Missouri provides around 200 volunteers, most of which are students. We work closely with professors in the university to promote the program and they often offer students credit particularly in the health and education program.

We also work with other city departments, such as transportation and planning, to promote the targeting of infrastructure dollars toward streets around schools. Elected representatives play a big role in making those decisions as well as school board members. A diverse partnership has allowed us to promote the program widely within the community, as well as get some tangible help in the way of funding and volunteers.

How replicable are PedNet’s programs? How and where do you see them working in other cities around the US?

My colleague Robert Johnson is our Director of Consulting, and he has been promoting different kinds of workshops and trainings and technical assistance services to other communities, sharing what we’ve learned around the country. We have an all-day Walking School Bus workshop, which is designed for a single community with a group of around 15 or 20 leaders from that community. We gather teachers, parents, and city officials and take them through a six-hour training on how to establish a Walking School Bus program in their community, and give them the tools to get started. We also include the PowerPoint presentation that we use to train new volunteers. We try to give these communities a whole package so that they can get their own programs going pretty quickly.

So far, we’ve led about 70 or 80 these workshops in the last two years. I did one two weeks ago in Longmont, Colorado, and they had very good representation from across the community. I’m very confident that their program will really take off.

What are some of the new and exciting things that are going on with PedNet right now?

We’ve been running a pilot program for the last couple of years where parents that live further out (say five or ten miles from their children’s school), can still benefit from the Walking School Bus. We do this by setting up a staging post about half a mile to a mile from school where the parents and the school buses can drop kids off, and they walk under the supervision of our volunteers from that location to the school, and then back again in the afternoon. The schools have benefitted by having less traffic around, and they’ve been very supportive. The Columbia School Board is very actively looking at not just bringing the Walking School Bus under their own operation, but expanding the staging posts so that multiple schools can enjoy this benefit. This also helps to promote advocacy for physical improvements around the school so that more kids can walk.

We’ve done a lot of work with middle school kids teaching them the League of American Bicyclists Safety Program. It’s a lot more intense to run a bike to school program because there’s equipment involved, and safety concerns are greater. The kids really have to be well-trained in how to interact with traffic and the volunteers that lead the bike brigade have to be highly trained. In our program, they are all certified instructors who do a three-day training with the League of American Bicyclists. But it’s hard to grow that quickly.

Another component is teaching teenagers how to use the public transportation system, if they have access to one. We have a very underfunded bus system in Columbia, and that’s one of our policy campaigns: to increase public funding for the bus system so that it provides better options for everybody. But with teenagers, if they start learning and using the bus early, they will really enjoy the increased freedom in getting around town.

Is there one obstacle in particular that you often see causing trouble with programs that are getting started or trying to grow?

The way that rural communities and suburbs are built, often with everything very spread out, can make starting a Walking School Bus program very difficult. I don’t know that we’re ever going to see sidewalks on every rural highway, or lane, so there will always be some sectors that don’t convert to active or public transportation, where the car makes most sense, and that’s probably OK. I think that there needs to be a balance. I would like to look to Copenhagen, where approximately one-third of all journeys are taken by walking or biking, one-third by public transportation, and one-third by private car. I think that’s a really nice balance for a city to aspire to. In most American cities, it’s more like 80% private car, 10% public transportation, and 10% walking or biking.

Note: Ian will be stepping down as Executive Director of PedNet in January 2013, and the position will be filled by Annette Triplett, who has been working in Missouri for several years in promoting healthy food in schools.

At Cleveland’s Market Square Park, local residents, businesses, and leaders have invested heavily in Place Capital. / Photo: PPS

“We’ve been wrong for the last 67 years,” Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, announced in his closing address at last month’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place (PWPB) conference. “Ok. Time to admit it, and move on! We have completely screwed up transportation in this country. We can never expect to see the legislative or policy change until people understand the fundamental underlying problem. Asking for 20% more bike lanes is not enough.”

The following week, at the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland, the same attitude was present. In her opening remarks to the gathering of market managers and advocates assembled at the Renaissance Hotel, USDA Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan stated that “We’re all here because we recognize that markets can be far more than places just to buy food. We’re looking at markets as venues for revitalizing their communities.”

These statements capture a sentiment that permeated the discussion at both of the conferences that PPS organized this fall: that reform—of transportation, food systems, and so many aspects of the way we live—is no longer about adding bike lanes or buying veggies from a local farmer; the time has come to re-focus on large-scale culture change. Advocates from different movements are reaching across aisles to form broader coalitions. While we all fight for different causes that stir our individual passions, many change agents are recognizing that it is the common ground we share—both physically and philosophically—that brings us together, reinforces the basic truths of our human rights, and engenders the sense of belonging and community that leads to true solidarity.

Even when we disagree with our neighbors, we still share at least one thing with them: place.  Our public spaces—from our parks to our markets to our streets—are where we learn about each other, and take part in the interactions, exchanges, and rituals that together comprise local culture. Speaking at PWPB, Copenhagenize.com founder Mikael Colville-Andersen made this point more poetically when he said that “The Little Mermaid statue isn’t Copenhagen’s best monument. I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.”

“I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.” / Photo: Spacing Magazine via Flickr

Our public spaces reflect the community that we live in, and are thus the best places for us to begin modeling a new way of thinking and living. We can all play a more active role in the cultural change that is starting to occur by making sure that our actions match our values—specifically those actions that we take in public places. At PWPB, April Economides offered a simple suggestion for softening business owners’ resistance to bicycle-friendly business districts: tell the proprietors of businesses that you frequent that you arrived on a bike. At another PWPB session on social media, Alissa Walker advocated for users of popular geo-locative social media platforms like FourSquare to start “treating buses and sidewalks as destinations,” and ‘checking in’ to let friends know that they’re out traveling the city by foot, and on transit.

And of course, when trying to change your behavior, you often need to change your frame of mind. At the Markets Conference, Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman recalled the efforts that were required to change the way that vendors at the West Side Market thought about their role within the local community when the market decided to remain open for more days each week. While many vendors didn’t need to be open extra days, Cimperman helped to re-frame things: “[I asked people to consider:] Who are we here for? We’re not here for ourselves. We’re here for the citizens of Cleveland.”

Individual action is invaluable, but when working to spark large-scale culture change, it is even more critical to develop an overarching strategy. Putting forth a constructive vision, along with clearly-stated goals that people can relate to, provides the framework that helps to guide the individual decisions that people within a movement make as they work to change the culture on the ground. To put public space at the heart of public discourse where it belongs, we should focus on changing the way that folks talk about the issue that’s already on everyone’s mind: the economy. Bikenomics blogger Elly Blue was succinct in her explanation of why tying culture change to economics is a particularly fruitful path in today’s adversarial political climate: “We can shift the paradigm of how we build our cities; thinking about economics is a great way to do that because it cuts through the political divide.”

Great places foster human interaction & economic opportunity / Photo: Fred Kent

Across the political spectrum most of us, after years of economic hardship (and decades of wayward leadership), have learned to react to things like “growth” and “job creation” with an automatic thumbs-up. We too rarely ask questions like “What are we growing into?” and “What kind of jobs are we creating?” This brings us to the concept of Place Capital, which posits that the economic value of a robust, dynamic place is much more than the sum of its parts. Great places are created through many “investments” in Place Capital–everything from individual actions that together build a welcoming sense of place, all the way up to major physical changes that make a space usable and accessible. Strong networks of streets and destinations are better at fostering human interaction, leading to social networks that connect people with opportunities, and cities where economies match the skills and interests of the people who live there. Public spaces that are rich in Place Capital are where we see ourselves as co-creators of the most tangible elements of our shared social wealth, connecting us more directly with the decisions that shape our economic system.

At its core, Place Capital is about re-connecting economy and community. Today’s economy is largely driven by products: the stuff we make, the ideas we trademark, the things that we buy (whether we need them or not). It’s a system that supports the status quo by funneling more and more money into fewer and fewer hands. Leadership in this system is exclusively top-down; even small business owners today must respond to shifts in global markets that serve only to grow financial capital for investors, without any connection to the communities where their customers actually live. (For evidence of this, consider the fact that food in the average American home travels an average of 1,500 to 2,500 miles from farm to table, turning local droughts and floods into worldwide price fluctuations).

Through our own Placemaking work, we’ve found that public space projects and the governance structures that produce them tend to fall into one of four types of development, along a spectrum. On one end there are spaces that come out of project-driven processes; top-down, bureaucratic leadership is often behind these projects, which value on-time, under-budget delivery above all else. Project-driven processes generally lead to places that follow a general protocol without any consideration for local needs or desires. Next, there are spaces created through a design-led process. These spaces are of higher quality and value, and are more photogenic, but their reliance on the singular vision of professional designers and other siloed disciplines can often make for spaces that are lovely as objects, but not terribly functional as public gathering places. More and more, we’re seeing people taking the third kind of approach: that which is place-sensitive. Here, designers and architects are still leading the process, but there is concerted effort to gather community input and ensure that the final design responds to the community that lives, works, and plays around the space.

Finally, there are spaces that are created through a place-led approach, which relies not on community input, but on a unified focus on place outcomes built on community engagement. The people who participate in a place-led development process feel invested in the resulting public space, and are more likely to serve as stewards. They make sure that the sidewalks are clean, the gardens tended, and their neighbors in good spirits. They are involved meaningfully throughout the process—the key word here being “they,” plural. Place-led processes turn proximity into purpose, using the planning and management of shared public spaces into a group activity that builds social capital and reinforces local societal and cultural values.

After participating in the discussions at PWPB and the Markets Conference this fall, we believe that the concept of Place Capital is ideally-suited to guide the cooperation of so many individual movements that are looking for ways to work together to change the world for the better. Place Capital employs the Placemaking process to help us outline clear economic goals that re-frame the way that people think not only about public space but, by extension, about the public good in general. If we re-build our communities around places that put us face-to-face with our neighbors more often, we are more likely to know each other, and to want to help each other to thrive.

“It’s because our public spaces got so bad that we have led the world in developing ways to make them great,” argued Eastern Market director Dan Carmody at the Markets Conference, explaining the surge of interest in Placemaking in the United States over the past few decades. We have momentum on our side; if we focus on creating Place Capital, we can continue to build on that forward motion, and bring together many different voices into a chorus.

Like capital attracts capital, people attract people. As Placemakers, we all need to be out in our communities modeling the kind of values that we want to re-build local culture around. Our actions in public space—everything from saying hello to our neighbors on the street to organizing large groups to advocate for major social changes—are investments in Place Capital. Great places and strong economies can only exist when people choose to participate in creating them; they are human-powered monuments. So let’s get to work.

This September’s International Public Markets Conference will be a key opportunity to gather with public market managers, boosters, and organizers to talk about how to create even more vital public spaces centered on food and community. The early bird registration period ends on July 31st–
click here to register today!

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Image Sources: Kansas City, Minneapolis, Detroit, Cincinnati, Santiago, San Juan, Halifax, Bury, London/Covent, London/Columbia, Copenhagen, Benjarmasin, Adelaide, The Channon