There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that only working mothers understand. It’s not one big thing — it’s the accumulation of a hundred small logistics, repeated every single morning, before you’ve even started your actual job. The lunch box. The lost shoe. The “have you brushed your teeth” said for the fourth time. And then the drive — sitting in a school-gate traffic jam, engine idling, watching the clock tick past the time you told your 9am meeting you’d be online.

Walked.by exists because two women, in the middle of that exact juggle, decided there had to be a better way. This is the story of how it started.

How We Met

Julia and Sophie met at a Green Schools Collective meeting in late 2025, in a room full of people thinking about how to make everyday life more sustainable for kids and communities. On the agenda that day was the Mayor of Willoughby, presenting on a local initiative that had engaged a public primary school to help design its own walking routes to school.

“Walked.by exists because two women, in the middle of the daily parenting juggle, decided there had to be a better way. This is the story of how it started.” 

Sophie was in the room in the capacity of sustainability lead for MPS P&C, she’d been conducting research into why children at Mosman Public School (MPS)  were — or weren’t — walking to school, as part of a broader push to improve active transport in the area. Hearing the Willoughby story land in the same room as her own research felt like more than coincidence.

A Mutual Connection, A Shared Purpose

It turned out Julia and Sophie had daughters in the same school year — and when Sophie’s daughter moved to Julia’s daughter’s school, that shared thread became a reason to catch up properly. Over coffee, what started as a parent connection quickly became something bigger.

Both women had spent time living overseas, in places where walking to school isn’t a novelty — it’s just what you do. Both had moved to Australia and, driven by that experience, each independently attempted a full year without a car. Both knew, first-hand, how hard it is to hold onto that value once you’re back in a country built around driving — and how much genuine effort it takes to make an idea like “no car” actually work in daily Australian life.

What they found in each other was a shared, stubborn belief: that the way we move our children through their days shouldn’t come at the cost of their health, their independence, or the planet they’re inheriting. They wanted system change — not a personal workaround, but something that could shift outcomes for children and communities more broadly.

Mosman Council was interested enough to want to keep the conversation going, and Julia and Sophie put their hands up to carry it forward. What they learned in those conversations was telling: councils are, understandably, focused on where they can invest — and that overwhelmingly means infrastructure. Footpaths. Crossings. Signage. Important, necessary work — but it left an obvious gap. Nobody was building the *service* that would actually get children walking, safely, every day. That gap was the opportunity.

“We share a stubborn belief: that the way we move our children through their days shouldn’t come at the cost of their health, their independence, or the planet they’re inheriting.” 

Where the Product Came From

Julia and Sophie both knew the corporate grind intimately, and they knew the parent-juggle that sits underneath it — the daily tension between being present for your career and being present for the school run. So instead of guessing at solutions, they went and asked.

An initial survey confirmed what they suspected but wanted proven: children weren’t walking to school for two overwhelming reasons — time and safety. Parents didn’t have the spare hour, and even those who did weren’t comfortable letting their children walk unsupervised.

So that’s exactly what they set out to build. Not an app. Not an awareness campaign. A pilot, grounded in three commitments:

• A wellbeing outcome for children, spanning physical, mental, and emotional health — because a walking bus was never just about transport. It was about giving kids back a small, daily dose of independence, nature, and connection.
• A trust framework, built to directly answer parents’ safety concerns — because no parent hands over their child’s commute without knowing exactly who is walking beside them.
• A designed route, built to hand parents back up to an hour of their morning — time to work, to breathe, to just be, rather than be stuck in a school-gate queue.

“We are genuinely proud of what we’ve started, and why we started it.
Healthier, happier children. Less-stretched, less-stressed parents. A little less traffic outside the school gate — and a little more time given back to families who are juggling more than anyone should have to juggle alone.” 

Where We Are Now

Walked.by is still very much a work in progress. We’re building it route by route, trust by trust, family by family. But we are genuinely proud of what we’ve started, and why we started it.

Healthier, happier children. Less-stretched, less-stressed parents. A little less traffic outside the school gate — and a little more time given back to families who are juggling more than anyone should have to juggle alone.

If any of this sounds familiar – the juggle, the guilt, the traffic jam – we would love you to walk with us.