Within a few weeks, school routes across Denmark will once again be filled with hundreds of thousands of children, and the Danish Road Safety Council (Rådet for Sikker Trafik) says that annual return offers a genuinely good opportunity to teach kids to walk or cycle on their own. Beyond building useful traffic skills, that shift also means less traffic and more safety right outside the school gates.
Why driving to school often backfires on walking to school safety
Plenty of parents choose to drive their children to school simply out of care for their safety. The irony, though, is that the resulting build up of cars around schools in the morning tends to create congestion, confusing traffic situations, and more unease for the children who are walking or cycling instead.
Jakob Bøving Arendt, managing director of the Danish Road Safety Council, pointed out that driving can feel like the safer option on the surface, yet paradoxically, all those cars end up creating more unsafe situations right around the school. His advice to parents is to spend a bit of time actively training the school route with their child, so the child grows genuinely comfortable walking or cycling it independently. Learning to get around safely in traffic, in his view, counts as a core life skill, every bit as much a part of growing up in a modern society as learning to read or do arithmetic.
Cycling to school children learn best through repetition
Just as children learn to read, write and count through practice, they learn to navigate traffic the same way, through repetition and real world experience alongside an adult. Even a route walked every single day still throws up junctions and traffic situations that vary from one trip to the next, and Arendt noted that children only build the judgment to handle that variation by actually being out in traffic with their parents, ideally starting as early as possible.
Practical training can take several forms: walking or cycling the school route together a few times before the term starts, talking through where the safest crossing points are, practising how to check surroundings and stay aware of other road users, and choosing the safest route to school rather than automatically defaulting to the shortest one. Arendt acknowledged that going car free simply isn’t realistic everywhere in Denmark, but suggested a practical middle ground: parking a short distance from the school and walking the last stretch, so children still get some of that hands on traffic training even on days when driving is unavoidable.
School traffic congestion drops when more children walk or cycle
According to the Council’s own research, the volume and speed of cars is the single biggest source of unease parents report about school routes. The flip side follows naturally: as more children walk or cycle to school, fewer cars cluster around the school gates, making the route easier to read and genuinely safer for the children navigating it on foot or by bike.
