KAILUA, KONA, Hawai'i — Ask a group of adults how many walked or cycled to school and about two-thirds will raise their hands.

Ask how many of them know children who today walk or cycle to school and count those hands.

"It's close to zero," said Serena Chamberlain, president of Peoples Advocacy for Trails Hawaii, who took an informal poll at PATH's annual meeting last month.

To try to boost that number, PATH will start a "walking bus" program in the fall.

The walking bus is a supervised regular pedestrian route with designated stops throughout the neighborhoods surrounding a campus. Students log in and join the caravan on foot.

It is the newest innovation for the nonprofit group dedicated to promoting traffic safety education and a safe environment on roadways and trails for recreation, fitness and alternative modes of transportation.

PATH chose Waikoloa Elementary School for its inaugural program, slated to start in the next academic year.

"We have the funding, we have interest and we have the school on board," said Ann Peterson, a longtime traffic safety advocate and PATH member. "We'll test it at Waikoloa and set it up as a model that can be duplicated across the state. There are so many opportunities for this."

The group surveyed a handful of schools across the island to determine how students are getting to campuses and what factors limit walking or cycling to school.

Among the top answers were safety concerns, convenience, the age of a child, and not enough safe storage for bikes on campus. Fewer parents cited concerns about unfriendly dogs, scary people, heavy backpacks or bad weather.

The Waikoloa parent survey found that more than 90 percent of students live within two miles of the school, while more than 77 percent are driven to school. Slightly more than 17 percent walk and fewer than 5 percent bike.

Nearly 60 percent of parents said they have traffic safety concerns, which Peterson said is ironic, as those same parents add to the traffic each morning and afternoon.

"If everybody drops their kids off it exacerbates the safety issue. More cars means less safe," Peterson said.

Waikoloa Elementary School principal Kris Kosa-Correia said she supports the idea.

"I see a place for it," she said. "It's good for a healthy lifestyle and it will really help those parents who can't do it themselves."

She recalled school personnel walking with students for weeks after an attempted abduction in February 2005 at Waimea Elementary School. A student told her mother an older man jumped out of a green vehicle and attempted to grab her. The student was not injured and the man fled. No arrest has been reported in that incident.

"We're very protective of our students," Kosa-Correia said.

Peterson said PATH carries $1 million in liability insurance coverage and will use funding from the state Department of Health and Department of Transportation to hire walking bus supervisors, at a ratio of 10 students per adult.

"We need to pay a person who will be in charge of the kids," she said. "It's a big responsibility."