第一部分 英译汉

 

LECCO, Italy – Each morning, about 450 students travel along 17 school bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this lakeside city at the southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school buses.

 

In 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local traffic jams and – most important – a rise in global greenhouse gases abetted by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a retro-radical concept: children should walk to school.

 

They set up a piedibus (literally foot-bus in Italian) – a bus route with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a mix of paid staff members and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests lead lines of walking students along Lecco’s twisting streets to the schools’ gates, Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands.

 

At the Carducci School, 100 children, or more than half of the students, now take walking buses. Many of them were previously driven in cars. Giulio Greppi, a 9-year-old with shaggy blond hair, said he had been driven about a third of a mile each way until he started taking the piedibus. “I get to see my friends and we feel special because we know it’s good for the environment,” he said.

 

Although the routes are each generally less than a mile, the town’s piedibuses have so far eliminated more than 100,000 miles of car travel and, in principle, prevented thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the air, Dario Pesenti, the town’s environment auditor, estimates.

 

The number of children who are driven to school over all is rising in the United States and Europe, experts on both continents say, making up a sizable chunk of transportation’s contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions. The “school run” made up 18 percent of car trips by urban residents of Britain last year, a national survey showed.

 

In 1969, 40 percent of students in the United States walked to school; in 2001, the most recent year data was collected, 13 percent did, according to the federal government’s National Household Travel Survey.

 

Lecco’s walking bus was the first in Italy, but hundreds have cropped up elsewhere in Europe and, more recently, in North America to combat the trend.

 

Towns in France, Britain and elsewhere in Italy have created such routes, although few are as extensive and long-lasting as Lecco’s.

 

参考译文：

 

意大利，莱科——每天早上，大约有450名学生沿着17条校车的路线到达科莫湖最南端湖滨城市的10所中小学。那里没有校车。

 

2003年，为了应对儿童肥胖、交通阻塞，以及至关重要的汽车尾气排放所导致的全球温室气体增长这三重威胁，当地环保组织提出一项回归基本的概念：儿童应当步行去学校。

 

他们设立了步行汽车（在意大利被称为步行公共汽车）——该公共汽车有驾驶员但是没有车辆。每天早上各色各样受雇的员工和父母志愿者穿着黄色的荧光马甲，带领着成队的步行学生沿着莱科的蜿蜒街道到达学校门口，穿着彩衣的吹笛人会在队伍散开的时候不时地停在这里和那里。

 

在卡尔杜齐学校，目前有100名儿童或一多半的学生都步行去学校。他们中有很多人先前都开车去学校。9岁的朱利奥·格雷皮，金色的头发蓬松着，他说在开始乘坐步行公共汽车之前，每条路都是坐车行驶大约1/3英里。他说：“对于用步行这样的方式与朋友会面，我们都觉得很特别，因为我们知道这样对环境非常有益。”

 

达里奥·佩森蒂是镇上的一名环境稽核员，他估计，虽然每条线路长都不超过一英里，但是到目前为止，城镇的步行公共汽车已经替代了10万多英里的汽车路程，大体上防止了上千吨的温室气体进入大气。

 

欧美大陆的专家称，在美国和欧洲，开车去学校的儿童数量不断增长，这在交通量对温室气体排放的影响中占据了相当大的分量。一项全国性调查显示，去年，在英国城市居民的汽车行程中，学校行程占18%。

 

根据联邦政府的全国家庭旅行资料，1969年，美国40%的学生步行去学校；2001年，据收集的最近几年的数据显示，13%的学生步行去学校。

 

莱科是意大利最先设立步行公共汽车的城市，但在欧洲的其他地方涌现了上百起，最近在北美也出现了同样的情况，这都是为了应对步行去学校的学生数量减少这一趋势。

 

法国、英国和意大利其他地方的城镇已经设立了这样的线路，虽然很少能像莱科的那样广阔和漫长。