Last week my daughter's school had a "bike breakfast", this is an event that encourages children to get to school under their own steam and they get rewarded with a healthy fruit breakfast and various goodies like reflective wristbands, which are exactly the types of thing that excite children of primary school age!

In addition there were "Dr Bike" checks, inflating tyres, making adjustments etc. and a session with about 20 kids doing a cycling skills course on the playground. In a school of around 400 children there were 130 attendees for the breakfast with 81 bikes and 17 scooters counted.

The event was organised by our local "Bike It Officer" who is employed by Sustrans and works in partnership with Bournemouth and Poole Councils.

Sustrans are a UK charity enabling people to travel by foot, bike or public transport for more of the journeys we make every day.

Sustrans believes every child deserves to be free range, with freedom from their front door to explore, play outdoors, and make their own way to school and beyond.

Sustrans makes smarter travel choices possible, desirable and inevitable. You can find out more about them at sustrans.org.uk

The 2010 National Travel Survey (NTS) reported that nationally, just 2% of children aged 5-16 years cycled as their main mode of transport to school in 2010.

In comparison, Bike It schools in Bournemouth had a relatively high level of pupils cycling to school every day - 3.9% of pupils.

Following one year of Bike It every day cycling to school more than doubled in Bournemouth increasing to 8.8% of pupils, more than four times the NTS national average In addition, results from schools in Bournemouth over their first year of engagement in Bike It show that regular cycling to school increased from 21.5% of pupils before the project to 38.9% of pupils.

This represents a larger increase from a higher baseline than the national average for Bike It schools – in 2010-2011 regular cycling at Bike It schools in England increased from 15.3% of pupils before Bike It to 27.2% after.

Furthermore, the percentage of pupils at Bournemouth Bike It schools who say they ‘never’ cycle to school has reduced from 66% to 33.9%.

This represents a larger decrease from a lower baseline than the national average for Bike It schools – in 2010-2011 the percentage of pupils who said they ‘never’ cycle to school at Bike It schools in England reduced from 70.7% to 51.5%.

Hopefully this shows that children are cycling to school and are going to carry on doing this when they leave school. It's not just the benefits of reduced congestion and pollution; the increase in exercise also reduces the risk of obesity and promotes learning by making children more active and alert.

More important that any of these figures is the fact that cycling is fun! A bad journey by bike in the cold and wind and rain is still far better than any journey by car, I might get home wet and cold and tired, but I will still have a smile on my face!

To finish this week, here is a worrying statistic that I read in a newspaper a couple of weeks ago.

Last year 1,480 motorists escaped the automatic driving ban after being convicted of drink driving; that's three percent of the 55,539 that were convicted of this offence. Suffolk and the City of London are the most lenient areas with 1 in 20 drink drivers being let off.

Based on information supplied by David Brown.