Photo: Mat_the_WWe’ve written about bribing kids to get better grades. But what about bribing them to walk or ride their bike to school?
A new working paper examines a program in Boulder, Colorado that attempted to incentivize kids to bike or walk to school over a span of several years. The program began with a $10 cash prize for the first two years, but then switched over to a $10 bike store coupon thereafter. One lucky student who rode and walked to school every day during a “prize period” won the coupon.
Even considering the small, non-cash winnings, biking and walking to school increased 16 percent during the prize period. Here’s the abstract:
We analyze the effects of a school-based incentive program on children’s exercise habits. The program offers children an opportunity to win prizes if they walk or bike to school during prize periods. We use daily child-level data and individual fixed effects models to measure the impact of the prizes by comparing behavior during prize periods with behavior during non-prize periods. Variation in the timing of prize periods across different schools allows us to estimate models with calendar-date fixed effects to control for day-specific attributes, such as weather and proximity to holidays. On average, we find that being in a prize period increases riding behavior by sixteen percent, a large impact given that the prize value is just six cents per participating student. We also find that winning a prize lottery has a positive impact on ridership over subsequent weeks; consider heterogeneity across prize type, gender, age, and calendar month; and explore differential effects on the intensive versus extensive margins.
This bump in exercise is significant, especially considering the overall downturn in children walking to school at all. From 1969 to 2001, the percentage of self-commuters dropped from 41 percent to 13 percent. In his recent article pointing this out, Freakonomics contributor Eric Morris ended on an inquisitive note:
“So the next question is, what factors cause kids to walk and bike? And how can we use that information to promote active travel?”
In the Boulder experiment, children who won the lottery were excluded from winning future lotteries, but remained actively commuting to school for the next two weeks. After this, however, they went back to normal. Problematically, the 16 percent increase in walking and biking did not exist during non-prize-periods. But this study, at least in part, offers the beginning of an answer.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Wait — isn’t biking to school child neglect?
http://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2011/09/tn-child-biking-to-school-alone-child-neglect.html
Another option:
Eliminating buses
I’m doubting that would work in poor, rural areas where students are sometimes 30+ minutes away from the school and parents lack the resources to provide transportation.
On the contrary, in poor rural areas (or at least the one I grew up in some years ago) a 20-30 minute walk or ride to the school was commonplace.
And students probably walked in the snow, up-hill both ways.
I know many people in Appalachian communities (especially with the school consolidation movement of the 90′s) who are 20-30 miles from schools. Add this to the safety hazards created by a lack of lighting, markings, etc. on roads, and abolishing buses sounds like a pretty detrimental policy.
Apples and oranges: 20-30 miles is not a 20-30 minute walk or bike ride. I would suppose that even in those Appalachian communities (not dissimilar to the one I grew up in, except for the folklore) there are a good number of the students who do live within easy walk/bike distance, since the consolidated schools tends to be in the larger towns.
And unfortunately, my walk was pretty flat, though we did have a good bit of snow and sub-zero temperatures.
I should have been more clear in the original post, my apologies. I was referring to a 30+ minute car ride (which would probably be 20-30 miles). A 20-30 minute walk definitely wouldn’t be too much to request, though there would probably be alot of unhappy kids.
I grew up in a rural area. We lived two miles away (by the road), which is a 40-minute walk each way for a teenager or adult. It’s an hour-long walk for a Kindergartner.
At the time, walking to school would have taken us past four other homes. Only two of those four homes had children living there. Only one of them was considered by the school district’s policies to be within walking distance of the school, and that was the elderly caretaker’s trailer right next to the elementary school. ~95% of the school’s students lived further away than we did. Some of them lived a dozen miles away. (Ours was considered an unusually small rural school district.)
School buses really are a necessity in rural areas.
No where in the article did it suggest that incentives should be used in rural areas. The majority of Americans live in urbanized areas.
The rural area discussion was in response to the generalized statement that eliminating buses was a viable policy option. Nowhere in the article did it suggest abolishing the bus system, but we still are having that conversation.
While this might be partly true in urban communities, the elimination of buses as a general rule would have horrendous policy implications for 20% of the population who lives in rural areas. And in many urbanized areas, I can imagine that it would be pretty unsafe to allow your kids to walk/bike ride to school (ie inner-city schools).
From a training perspective, these incentives don’t help kids change their lifestyle, because the reward is not immediate and the reward is based on a chance that they might happen to get some money. This is why I don’t like the incentive programs at school. They are set up so that kids get money at the end of 3-6 month period. This is not an immediate payoff, and the kids loose interest over that time frame. It would best be accomplished if test were conducted on computers, and say $.01 was given for each correct answer. Over a test, you would end up with a bigger amount of money, and over test after test, the money would build up, until that money would be a substantial amount. Then you would see test scores rise. You have to change the motivation for good grades, and to do that, you need the correct tools. Ahh, if more people followed the work of Skinner.
I’d rather see suburban communities go to much, much smaller school sizes, combine grades and have neighborhood schools. The trend, at least in suburban ATL, has been to create schools with 5 or 6 classes of each grade, in one big campus. Thus, they are net farther away from more kids and there are simply fewer opportunities to ride bikes.
The suburban neighborhoods don’t help, because it seems so many neighborhoods are now huge groups of cul-de-sacs with only one entry/ exit onto a major road where riding for kids, even on a side walk, would really be dangerous.
I’m a cyclist, and I have tried to ride on the suburban roads near my house, and it is impossible to avoid major roads/ intersections.
I agree with the commenter who said the real issue was the parents. I have a child in 5th grade and we live 3 blocks from his school, albeit with a major street between us. At the start of 4th grade I tried to get him to get himself to school (walk or bike) but he was too timid. At the start of 5th grade I merely informed him that he was on his own. He was still anxious but he did it, and by the second day he informed me that he actually loved riding, and now it’s hard to keep him from desiring to make his own way to and from school on those rare occasions I want to take him. Riding a bike to middle school will not be an option for him, but there is a chance that he can ride his bike to the elementary school and catch a bus from there, and he actually is hoping that can work.
Sadly, despite the fact that his school has a student population of 5-600 and that at least a quarter of those students live as close as we do and half live within reasonable walking distance, only 2-3 other kids ride bikes to school, based on the number of bicycles in the racks. I doubt that more than the same number walk, meaning roughly 1% of the population walks or rides, while only a few percent more are bussed, meaning 90+% are driven by their parents. Interestingly, when my son first showed up to school with his helmet on his backpack he was considered quite impressive by his peers. I think the potential exists for more students to commute themselves, but the issue is, as always, parents. Are we going to obsess over “safety” issues which don’t exist? Are we going to be willing to be parents and make the tough choices to not always do the “nice” thing, because in the long run the nice thing isn’t really nice.
I encourage my neighbors to follow my lead, but to no avail….
disneyland did not reply me