In 2024, Hawaii’s roads claimed over 100 lives and left more than 500 people seriously injured.
Factors contributing to these traffic crashes included drug use, car-centric road design, and distracted driving such as using a cellphone while driving. These factors increase the risk of collision, injury and death for pedestrians and bicyclists, particularly for school children.
As a researcher at the University of Hawaii, one of my interests is understanding road use behaviors in terms of how families and their keiki live their lives everyday — getting their children ready for school, making sure they get on the school or public bus, then rushing off to work. Mobility and transportation touch so many aspects of an individual’s life, but we may take that for granted and forget; particularly, we forget how important transportation is for children to get to and from school.
Based on my research fieldwork in rural areas on neighbor islands and urban Oahu, school children tend to have multimodal transportation patterns. The various multimodal combinations include: parents driving them to the bus stop to catch a school bus or a public bus; walking to catch the school or public bus; riding a bicycle to and from school, then walking with the bicycle up the mountain to get home; and more.
In a remote and isolated village at 600-4,600 feet above sea level on the Big Island, I asked the keiki what motivated them to wake up at 4 a.m. to get ready for school. After waking up to do chores, they would then have to walk down lava fields in pitch black darkness in their slippers while trying to avoid aggressive dogs to get to the bus stop, where there aren’t any bus shelters or crosswalks.
The keiki were motivated to go to school not just to learn but to be able to eat free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch with their friends and play sports together. They wouldn’t be able to eat, play and learn if they missed the school bus, or if there weren’t enough bus drivers to drive them to school — or if a driver speeding in darkness failed to see the child walking to the bus stop. These transportation related challenges then lead to chronic absenteeism in school.
In Downtown Honolulu, I asked children who walked to school why they would sometimes be late for school. For their safety, keiki who live in affordable housing would sometimes take longer walking routes to avoid “stranger danger” or use a crosswalk or traffic lights further away to safely cross the road. Unfortunately, making this choice would inadvertently mean they would be late for school. Unaccompanied elementary school children would also take the initiative to walk together in small groups to increase visibility and feel safer together.
These challenges underscore the need for the state’s Safe Routes to School Program.
We need to prioritize safe routes to school for our keiki. Safe Routes to School helps provide transportation options for keiki by developing pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, organizing walking school buses, adding bicycle racks, and advocating for new transportation solutions and more within a one-mile radius of public schools. Despite the importance of this program, it is severely underfunded. Nearly 80% of high-priority pedestrian, bicycle and multimodal projects across the state that are awaiting funding are located near schools.
For many children, going to school means everything to them. We can do more to help get them there safely.
Treena Becker, Ph.D., is a University of Hawaii researcher.
