My wife walks the kids to school, she knows that by driving them (which she has to option to do) she is teaching them to be lazy and it is so unhealthy for them.
So why does every other parent wants to? It is evident from school holidays the major source of congestion on our roads is caused by the School run. Everyone knows about it but they are too Selfish and Lazy to do anything about it. Just think the money you would save by having one car in the household?
'Drive your kids, kill your kids!' - hard hitting but it is the truth!
'But I need my car to go to work?' - the solution is car sharing, it is more social and reduces petrol consumption. Why not even catch the bus? What about walking? Is the pace of life that fast these days?
I am not saying give up the second car, just think a little bit more about how it is used?
Edited by Pugugly on 12/03/2008 at 16:40
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Couldn't agree more. When I was at my first school, I had to walk 3/4 mile each way, because no one had cars then! My second school, I cycled 3 miles (ecah way) or got the bus. My third school I cycled 8 miles each way or got the bus. And with no McDonalds, not one of my school chums was obese.
My son walked to school (1 mile each way) and then used public transport - we then had the option to drive him, but he preferred to go with the rest of his school chums (probably because they got up to nonsense on the way!)
I now use my car to get to work - but only becuase I start at 6am and have no public transport available at all.
And my grand-daughter - she walks 3/4 mile each way to school - with her Mum and the dog. And she manages without McDonalds and hates fizzy juice so isn't obese either.
But we've actually seen someone drive their kid 1/4 mile to school - yes, 440 yards - I could probably walk there faster from door to door than she can drive (in her BMW X5 that does a paltry 8,000 miles a year - she doesn't work) simply because "she's too busy".
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I had a lift to school probably 3 times over an eight year period, usually when Dad had a pool car for a business trip (although with 1980s Leyland, the car seemed to break down more often than not.)
You can't squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube! Parents now get to choose (or bribe) their kids' way into a choice of school, often miles away. Bus (train??) routes rarely match needs and are expensive and slow; the "school run" is usually really a "drop the kids off on my way to work" run so is seen as justified by "green" poseurs in 4 x 4s.
Cycling/walking are perceived as dangerous (it's the school run cars that cause this, of course; I wonder how many kids are injured or killed every year by school-run cars...)
Different story in New Zealand: kids walk to school in long "crocodiles", often barefoot!
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My kids (16 and 14) go to school by train (5 miles, 6 mins), but bike the 0.6 mile to the station, and walk to/from the station about 0.8 mile at the other end.
But then again we live out in the sticks, and they think nothing of spending a Sunday morning taking part in a cross-country race and getting covered in mud.
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I lived 6 miles from school and cycled it. This was 1987-1993, so not exactly in the dim, distant past.
I remember getting a lift once, and that was down to the biggest dump of snow we'd seen in years.
Out of our school of about 350 pupils, there were two cars outside at kicking out time to pick up two kids who lived in completely different towns, with no bus or train access.
This is a very recent phenomenon.
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Is it because more kids are now not local to their schools? Why send your child to the rubbish school down the road when there's a good one 4 miles away?
I suppose the other thing is that cars are so handy. After dropping the kids off you can go shopping and carry half a dozen shopping bags several miles back. Or go to work another few miles away.
Pretty sure people aren't paying thousands a year for a car, hundreds for insurance, hundreds for maintenance and thousands for petrol just because they fancy another car on the driveway. And once you get into "is your journey justified?" you're on a sticky wicket because almost everyones is. Everyone else's isn't.
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Around 10 years ago a new primary school was built at the top of the housing estate where I lived at the time. It was exactly half a mile from the furthest part of the estate to the school. There was also another estate roughly the same distance from the school and another a little further away. So the majority of the catchement area for the school was no more than half a mile away.
Unsurprisingly, when the school opened there was only a small car park for staff members with the assumption that most pupils would walk. What a mistake that was, it was absolute chaos there mornings and afternoons with cars parked everywhere, on top of junctions, blocking the road, anything.
In the end the landscaped area in front of the school had to be dug up and turned into a car park to ease the chaos. It must have cost £100K or more! And once the car park was built, on a winters day they would all sit in their cars with the engine running! On as still day the air was absolutely thick with exhaust fume.
All this because of a lot of selfish, lazy and ignorant people.
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This reply is slightly off topic as it has nothing to do with a BMW [I mentions this only because this topic is headed "BMW - Traffic Congestion & the School Run" ]
Around 10 years ago a new primary school was built at the top of the housing estate
Some few years previous to that, some "car-friendly" new towns were built with no traffic lights and with special cycle lanes and footpaths which kept these forms of travel separate from each other. One particular such town had loads of free parking in the town centre. In recent times, NuLabour relocated a major Government Department to that town. As part of its anti-car policy, they provided just a handful of parking places reserved for the top mandarins and the occasional visit from a Minister. The staff started using the nearby free shopping centre car parks. The shopping centre introduced a 2 hour free parking limit. Result trade has dropped at the shopping centre and the Govt. Dept. staff are regularly late getting to work due to having to rely on buses, and vacancies hard are to fill. Even the temporary staff give up and refuse to accept placements there after one or two weeks of trying to get there by public transport.
Edited by jbif on 12/03/2008 at 11:06
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When I went to school we lived in the sticks 12 miles from school, with no public transport. Therefore no option but to drive. But one of Mum & Dads friends did actually start their own minibus company to ferry the kids to school - even my Mum got her PSV licence so she could take turns at running the minibuses. I doubt this could happen now because of insurance/health & safety/CRB check problems!
Our kids walk to their village school, but as we now know that in the future we will not be able to send them to their preferred, nearest, state school (due to it being over-subscribed), we will probably have to drive them to an alternative.
There is more to criticising kids being ferried to school by car than meets the eye - if all kids could go to a good local school there would not be the need for kids to be driven to school. But the government has not provided sufficient numbers of good school places where needed.
Edited by boxsterboy on 12/03/2008 at 11:23
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in reply to boxsterboy, there's a guy four doors down the street who drives his kids to school. We walk and without hurrying my son is entering the school gates before this guy gets to the road the school is on and then he's still to find somewhere to park. Best of all he's not in a hurry to go elsewhere, he just drives straight home again!
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It is said that 20% of the traffic on roads in the morning is down to the school run. I agree that people really should use their pegs but what "right", above and beyond the school runners, do the other 80% have?
With us - we walk my daughter to school which is about 10 minutes away. To be honest I rather like walking her to school. My son is driven to school about 4 miles away.
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I no longer have children at the village school but think this thread, on the whole, is not a complete picture.
Our village school has 28 staff, not including the dinner ladies, playgroup staff and cleaners, etc. most of whom do not live in the village itself i.e. within walking distance. That is at least 25 cars plus a few bikes. During the day lots of other regular support staff also arrive at the school - ed. psych., speech therapist, school nurse, sports coaches and music teachers.
There are (at present) four taxi's to transport some of the children.
The first bus from the west that comes past at 8 am - 40 minutes before the gates are opened to the playground so any 4-11 year old would have to wait on a major road for 40 minutes. The westbound bus does not arrive until after 9am so those children/staff would be late every day.
Not all the increased school traffic is down to parents - all schools have to be staffed.
Traffic also decreases greatly during school breaks, as parents also have to take time off then to look after their children.
Yes, as in all walks of life, there are the lazy but very few of the parents dropping off children work in the village and are going on to work elsewhere - not within walking distance. Mine walked the mile if possible but if I was working elsewhere, were dropped off. That way I knew they where they were and that they were safe.
Those of us who walked long distances to school, as I did, had Mum at home and lots of lookouts en route - as my brother and I found out when we misbehaved one afternoon under the impression we had no witnesses! This made us doubly safe as any strange cars were also noticed - locals knew the dozen or so cars in the village at that time!
Edited by deepwith on 12/03/2008 at 13:33
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Times have moved on, cars are cheap, both parents work and many need a car to do their day to day work so dropping kids off at school is the natural thing to do.
I agree that anyone who does a journey just to drive children half a mile to school is a lazy so and so!
I have noticed that traffic on my commute this week has reduced dramatically - currently taking 15-20 minutes to do 7 miles, rather than the usual 25-30, but all the children are still in school.
The only reason I can think is it's close to the end of the leave year for many workers and they are taking time off to use up leave before the end of March.
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I used to walk to school, so did almost all of my friends and many who were in the next town got buses or coaches (laid on by the school but charged for). People are much more lazy now and I think that the fact that schools in my area now have problems with too many parents driving their children despite improved public transport in the 12 years since I left bears that out. Having a good transport system in place isn't enough though, someone who hasn't ever used a bus regularly before might be scared to use it because they don't understand the timetables or find it confusing to know which buses stop where. These seem like small things but when I first started commuting to work via trains and buses I couldn't make head nor tail of which platform or stop to go from but after a couple of weeks I wondered how I could have found it confusing and found that if I timed my arrival at the station or stop then most of the time the journey was pretty good. Oxford is an example of where buses work well because they have an extensive park and ride scheme with bus lanes and all-day parking is limited and expensive in the town centre. Unfortunately the lazy and/or confused people are not going to stop using cars until it takes them 4 hours to get through the jams, I think that if schools regularly provided details to parents of bus routes from and to the school and bus companies/councils made sure there were services scheduled to be convenient for schools (i.e. it's put on a plate for people) then the take up would grow. Unfortunately it seems like suggested solutions always seem to fall down to schools, councils, the government etc. having to baby people and be responsible on their behalf. I just wish people would think a bit more rather than being such horrible, blank, selfish automatons, blindly stomping through life consuming and grabbing :-D The road where I live is near a school and a cul de sac and gets massively congested with parents waiting to pick their children up, sometimes I can't get in or out of it and the default behaviour of inconsiderate people is to avoid eye contact and ignore the situation because they have an "i couldn't get a proper space so why shouldn't I park on this mini-roundabout" attitude. OK I'm ranting but I'd definitely like to see a bit more community spirit, co-operation and reasonable behaviour from people rather than hang-dog, blank thousand yard stares followed by explosive rage as soon as something isn't going exactly how they want.
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All my three children go to the same school. I usually drop them off on the way to work, so I would be going that way anyway and i need my car for work (i don't simply sit at a desk).
My oldest has decided that he would like to walk to school, so we let him - it takes him about 15 minutes. When he goes to the local high school, he will walk, as almost all the children from around our way who go to that school, walk.
However, there are some mothers (and its always mothers!) in their Audi Q7s or X5s etc who drive no more than 100 yards! Arghh..
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My parents never had a car so I always went to school on the bus. In those days the Corporation ran trolleybuses/diesel buses from the town centre to a three-school campus 2 miles out with a fare of 1 1/2d (less than 1p) return for under 16's. (Petrol then was about 4 shillings (or 20p) a gallon.
When I and my second wife had 5 children between us, the daily fares to the same campus would have been much more than the cost of 4 miles petrol twice a day, so my wife ran them there on her way to work and collected them on her way home.
Fares for her grandchildren are now similarly unaffordable compared to fuel cost.
For this, the de-regulation/privatisation of public transport is largely to blame; the local authority made a better job of it, was not under pressure to make a profit so fares were lower and services were scheduled more sensibly than is now the case.
For example, every 10 minutes throughout the day two rival companies' buses run past here nose to tail on the same route; most of the time there are less than 8 passengers combined on two 40 seater 10mpg buses.
It would make more environmental and economic sense to alternate the service between the companies, (as used to be the case between neighbouring Boroughs on intertown routes).
Common sense these days is anything but common, it seems to me.
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Common sense these days is anything but common it seems to me.
'Internal market' (puke).
Services which used to be owned by local authorities for the benefit of their shareholders (taxpayers) are now supposedly separate organisations expected to 'compete' with each other to reduce costs to the consumer (tee hee) and provide the consumer or customer with 'more choice'.
The result is empty buses and higher fares, or overcrowded buses and higher fares, or no buses.
Good old Mrs Thatcher. She and her horrible evil American ideological godfathers have done this, and to the health and education services too.
People here are very down on socialism which has never existed in this country. I think some of them need to turn round and look in another direction.
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Neither of our kids are at school yet (oldest is in his first year at nursery, youngest starts nursery in September), but we can see the high school from our window, and the primary school is just behind that. However, folks opposite still drive their kids to school.
Drive them to school? It takes about 3 minutes to walk to the high school, so about 5 minutes to walk to the primary school. Driving at that time is probably at least 5 minutes in clear traffic.
I always walked to school (1mile each way) and used to turn down lifts (mainly because my mother drove a yellow metro!).
But I do understand that because the catchment area for the high school is 100sq km that some people have to drive. There are a number of buses (5 or 6) that come out of the school and there are only 500 pupils!
As for car sharing to work etc.. Its fine if everyone goes into the office everyday, but in my trade its not practical, oh and the fact that no-one living near me works near me. And as for public transport - doesn't start till 8am, at which point I've been at work for 1hr & 30mins. But by starting my work day at 6.30 (leave the house at 5.20) and then going home at 3.45 (get home at 5.15 I miss most of the rush hours.
Socialism - not likely. I'd give anything to have Thatcher back running the country. I was born a month after she came to power and they were good times when I was a kid, we had enough money, two cars and a nice detached house. All things I'm trying to give my kids.
Edited by SuperBuyer on 13/03/2008 at 07:32
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"For this, the de-regulation/privatisation of public transport is largely to blame; the local authority made a better job of it, was not under pressure to make a profit so fares were lower and services were scheduled more sensibly than is now the case."
I went to school around 10 miles away by bus back in the 60's and 70's and the buses were clean, modern and reliable and to the best of my remembrance never broke down.
In the same area now following "de-regulation/privatisation" the buses are invariably very old, dirty and unreliable. Some are 25-30 years old or more. All it amounts to is a variety of companies competing to be the cheapest.
Someone I know lives around 5 miles from the local secondary school and had been putting her daughter on the bus to school. However, the bus was so unreliable (broke down so often) that she was missing significant amounts of schooling so had to resort to the car.
The dogmatic view that private is always better and competition will always produce the best end result IMHO needs to tempered with some degree of common sense.
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My children were getting the school bus until very recently. The buses are very old and kept breaking down. Also they were getting later and later, and my children were often late into school, even though it wasn't their fault.
I've now decided either I or my wife will drive them to school in the morning just to ensure they get there on time. They still get the bus of an evening though.
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I agree that it's ridiculous to have privatised services such as buses and trains, these companies have a duty to provide "value" to their shareholders (mostly banks and investment companies) not to their customers. In fact if a CEO were to put the customers first and could not prove that this would have a positive effect on profits they would (and have been) removed from their positions. I am a big thatcherite in many ways and applauded the breaking of the unions who have a lot to answer for regarding what happened to our british owned car industry but privatisation was a mistake. Public transport should be re-nationalised and run semi-independantly from the government with a remit only to provide the best possible service with a profit margin geared toward adequate re-investment in improvemtns to the service and technology etc. The semi-independant status should protect them from being used to serve the government's politial agenda e.g. by being used to employ the unemployable and hence boosting employment figures and also the government needs to make it much easier to sack scum for incompetence, theft, gross misconduct etc. within their own institutions. It has already been pointed out above why competition in public services does not work and I am 100% behind that viewpoint. The only duty that you or I would have is to spread the word amongst our friends and family that we have a duty to treat others with respect and politeness when we do sit next to them on the bus or train rather than as we seem to in our cars where verbal abuse, gestures and violent threats seem to be a day to day occurance - particularly by little blond women in range rovers on the school run ;-). Also I think that the children of this country need to be taught the green cross code like I was because the ones near me seem to be incapable of looking before crossing the road from mummy or daddy's car to the school gates and when they do deign to notice that a car has come to a halt after they walked out in front of it A BIT OF HASTE WOULDN'T GO AMISS EITHER!!! :-D
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The problems about school runs imo are a mixture of:
fewer local schools and bigger ones with larger catchment areas
poor public transport
no political will to solve either of the above.
Coupled with a natural view of parents to use their cars.
Solve the above issues and everything else falls into place.
Is there any political will?
No.
It is not high in any survey of what people want politically.
And if you want to solve it, it can be done at a local level through local councils.. to a limited extent. But basically it's a political issue.
(and as I say on VED increases, 40% of the population don't vote at General Elections and more than that at local elections...)
Edited by madf on 13/03/2008 at 13:48
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I always vote but it occurred to me that it's not easy to know what parties stand for without trawling through their boring rhetoric. It would be good to have a website sort of like uswitch where you can compare in a table all of the parties policies on major issues. I just went on to the tory and lib dem websites and searched for "VED" and it looks like the tories want to lower it for bands AAA to C (no mention of raising it for higher ones although this is implied with a view to make the overall burden the same or less on average). The lib dems just say they want to redo the banding with a £2000 top band.
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I always vote but it occurred to me that it's not easy to know what parties stand for without trawling through their boring rhetoric.
According to Labour's boring rhetoric we were goimg to get a referendum, weren't we?
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