http://www.camcycle.org.uk/map/location/13713/

All the children. 100 every day in the summer, dropping to 95% in the winter when some will take a bus instead.

Secondary school children routinely cycle a 40 km ( 25 mile ) round trip each day to get to school.

Before I went to West, I went to Eisenhower (6-8), and then Van Holten before that (K-5). I rode my bike to both schools. Not regularly, but on occasion. Yes, even when I was in 5th grade, I rode a bike to school. Without a helmet. And here I am typing a message about it.

I think this guy is just overly concerned about legal ramifications if a student gets smacked on Garretson, or within 100 yards of the school grounds. In today's ridiculously litigious society, I wouldn't be surprised if the school could be successfully sued for hosting a donated bike rack. So maybe he has ground to stand on, but what I don't understand is that it's okay to tether the bike to the chain link fence around the swamp, but it's not okay to tether the bike to a donated bike rack? WTF is the difference?

I miss the old days.

People fight passionately to justify their irrational expenditures. The principal is just like the average American, and will have spend $4 Million of lifetime savings potential through his $8,000/year cost of car ownership. There is no need for automakers to give kickbacks to people who are spending that kind of money without questioning it.

Instead, I hope that the Principal turns this into a Covics lesson for students, teaches them how to appeal to City Council, Public Works, and the School Board to work on funding to make the street safer (if that really is the concern).

I would guess that with some aggressive redesign of the street to include a bike lane, or Sharrows in the right lane, with Police patrol during school commute hours... The safety issues could be addressed, students would learn a lot, and the community could be a positive example instead of an embarassment.

As an adult who thinks, I don't want to respond with a knee-jerk reaction.

This article tells us nothing about the street in question. Is it particularly dangerous? Is there a bike lane, or even room for one? Is the speed limit in the area 55 MPH instead of 25?

The principal is saying that they provide bus service for students within walking distance because the street is too dangerous for pedestrians. Is there no sidewalk? (I see one in the photo, but maybe it doesn't go very far.)

I'm not defending the principal's actions, and I think the students did a useful and generous thing. However, there may be circumstances with which we're not aware . . . and this article (likewise the Star-Ledger source article) doesn't give us the answers.

Spike, I don't think for a minute that there is a 0.5% of death or serious injury from bicycling, even over 60 years of everyday commuting, which no one does. A bicyclist on the road that much will be far more experienced and skilled and have a much lower risk of a bad crash than the "hypothetical average" bicyclist I attempted to model in the most crude way. The point of my comment was to show that the statistics you were throwing out showing a much greater risk couldn't possibly be right. And if I wasn't clear, I am neither an epidemiologist nor a statistician, so no one should rely on my musings in comment 41, beyond concluding that they prove the "serious injury every 15 years" statistic wrong.

I'm really just bemoaning the inaccessibility of reliable data about the risks of bicycling (which inaccessiblity Charles to some degree confirmed), given the ubiquitous "popular wisdom" based on junk statistics and worse that bicycling is extremely dangerous. That popular wisdom underlies Riccobono's unfortunate stance against the kids at his school that wish to bicycle.

No. 41 estimated a 27% chance of death or serious injury from biking during a life time and estimates the chance of death per year as 0.5%. That seems about right to me and thats a pretty big risk. There are roughly 40000 deaths from car crashes each year or about 1.6% of total deaths. People spend much, much more time on average in cars than on bikes, so on per mile or per minute basis, biking is much more dangerous.

That said, biking is a blast.

Some of you may know that he was killed by a drunk driver in 2003, at the age of 57. While in my head I know that the larger trends that he measured are more important than individual cases, from an emotional point of view the fact that he himself was in the violent-death category is hard to overlook.

http://www.kenkifer.com/death.htm
http://www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/health/risks.htm

Mayer Hillman (U.K.) plumbed the data ~15 yrs ago and concluded that cycling's p-a benefits outweighed its crash risks by >10-to-1 even in
cycling-unfriendly England. Absurdly, his book with these findings is both out-of-print and hard to find on the Internet. I give a brief
account of it here. Maybe someone can post a direct link?

Also, B Only, kid cyclists do crash considerably more often than adults. It may also be that they need the p-a benefits of cycling somewhat less than adults. Thus, the risk-ratio reward for kids' cycling may be (a lot) less than 10-to-1, but I'm confident it's a good deal more than 1.

Let's not get sidetracked, though. Those NJ kids are fantastic. We should be showering them with hosannas and support from legal to financial to moral. I wish I was in a position to spearhead this or even just participate. They're a miracle.

Right, because today's politicians didn't make decisions to create the conditions that led to those automobile deaths. They made non-decisions to not prevent those deaths.

Now contrast the furor over a few million in phony pork line items in the City Council budget with the boredom with the fact that "due to circumstances beyond our control" the state and MTA are basically bankrupt.

That's why politicians like to make deals in the dark, and non-decisions to lock in existing benefits. If the politicians are "dismayed" about the CP backlash, it is because they are not used to being criticized, or even noticed, for their non-decisions.

I know you do not intend to foster or excuse inaction, Larry, but the poitician's excuse that s/he cannot encourage bicycling to school because of the political fallout is demonstrably false (or true in the same meaningless sense that virtually any policy change might come back to haunt the policymaker). We should demand more from our representatives.

Imagine if the city were to actively seek to have middle schoolers ride to school, and made an all out push to make it possible -- free, simple bicycles, racks at home and school, etc. Sooner or later one of them would be killed in an auto accident, and at that point the benefits would not matter politically, just that one death.

I wonder if it is possible to tally up all the children killed and injured while driving or being driven to school?

Even the New York City public school system seems to have overcome the fear of litigation, having installed City Racks directly in front of public elementary schools. DoT is even distributing cycling maps directly to NYC schools, to foster increased bicycling.

There's simply no basis for this suburban principal to hide behind litigation risk. Whether minors use bicycles for transportation or not is primarily their parents' responsibility, and secondarily their own responsibility. The risk that the school would be held liable based on its supposed tertiary role in encouraging bicycling is so remote it is laughable.