Jiho Lee wants to solve a problem that many lament but are also a part of creating: congestion at the school gate.
"Too many people are coming to school in cars. I want to change that," the 13-year-old student says.
Jiho walks the 20 minutes to Palmerston North Intermediate Normal School and home again. She sees the benefits for herself but wants to encourage more to give it a go. Her plan is to create a points-based system that rewards even short walks and builds to longer ones, so that more students will join her.
Fair Go chose Jiho as one of its 2022 Consumer Heroes and helped her take her pitch to the next level.
Jiho's challenge pits classmate against classmate to encourage everyone to walk the last 100 metres to school after being dropped off.
It could solve one of the hardest questions Jiho asked herself: how to include children whose parents insist on giving them a lift, for whatever reason.
"If you don't have a choice, you can just get dropped off near the school," she explains to Thomas Stokell, the chief executive of Love To Ride.
"I like that. You could get 100% participation," the Kiwi social entrepreneur says from his Atlanta home.
"Getting people to do it the first time is the hardest," he adds, suggesting the reward system counts the first trip and offers extra credit for a longer walk to school or for walking every day of the week.
Stokell has agreed to keep offering advice and encouragement to the young Consumer Hero as she investigates whether this could scale up to an app that students could download to run the challenge.
"The app's like the total dream thing. You could do that in a really low-tech way, you and some friends and some clipboards, marking off who did what or giving out stickers," Stokell says, who advises learning by doing before getting too locked into the software solution.
"You could continue taking action on this in the short-term to see your dream come true, without waiting for a set of developers to build you an app and test it and launch it on the app store and then get everyone to download it."
Jiho's drop-off challenge idea has also caught the interest of Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency.
"All of that information that you're gathering there could really help us to form up some sort of prototype or pilot, that we can then look to see how we could scale up or replicate elsewhere," Waka Kotahi director of regional relationships, Linda Stewart, says.
"What's really important is that it works for the people that are going to use it and who better to trial an idea like that than the students and the whānau themselves?"
Waka Kotahi plans to spend up to $350m over the next two years working alongside councils to improve transport choices, including measures like more walkable neighbourhoods and safer, greener, healthier travel to school.
"If it's a good idea, we can always find ways to make things happen," Stewart tells Jiho.
Jiho plans to expand from an initial test with four classes to challenge the whole school and then keep talking with Love to Ride and Waka Kotahi to take the idea nationwide.
Jiho is one of the winners of Fair Go's annual Consumer Heroes competition, which champions young people to find solutions to problems they see in their community.
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