Cycling Ireland has highlighted an astonishing plummet in the number of children cycling to school, dropping from 25 per cent of children 40 years ago to just three per cent today, even though the majority of parents want their offspring to cycle to school.

Speaking on The Claire Byrne Show on Irish radio station Newstalk, Cycling Ireland president Ciarán Cannon highlighted an “absolute generational collapse in children’s independent mobility”.

“A secondary school child should be easily able to cycle the three to five kilometres every morning and every evening,” he said.

“There’s no reason why they shouldn’t, other than the fact that their parents have serious safety concerns around that actual route to school. If you look about 40 years ago, we had one in four of our secondary school children cycling to school – that’s now about one in 30.”

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To encourage more kids to get to school via bike, Cycling Ireland has launched its Cycle Right programme, which trained 43,000 children last year, aiming to reach 50,000 annually. The programme covers bike handling, road positioning, and risk evaluation.

However, the programme will only work if parents feel confident enough to let their children ride among traffic. This is being tackled, to an extent, by the country’s Safe Routes to School Programme, which helps identify and improve cycling routes to and from schools. However, there’s still a shortfall.

“There are about 4,000 schools in Ireland right now between primary and post-primary and just over 500 schools are engaged in that programme,” Cannon explains. “So, we urgently need to scale up that; we need to invest in it and it’s a really, really sound investment in our children’s health and well-being.”

Balance Bike programme
Cycle training (Image Credit: Cycling Ireland)

Cannon’s comments follow research from RedClick and Ireland Thinks shows that nearly eight out of 10 children never cycle to school, with only five per cent cycling daily, while 70 per cent of parents would like their kids to commute by bike.

When asked why cycling is not feasible, parents cited distance to school as the leading reason (54 per cent), followed by heavy school bags (41 per cent), unpredictable weather (39 per cent), and a parent’s lack of confidence cycling with their children (22 per cent).

For parents of secondary school students, distance remains the primary challenge (54 per cent), followed closely by unsuitable school uniforms (49 per cent), a lack of confidence cycling (46 per cent), and concerns over the impact on personal appearance (42 per cent).

Across the Irish Sea in England, Labour has announced a plan to get at least 60 per cent of school-age children cycling, walking, or wheeling to class by 2035 as part of a £4.5bn active travel strategy.