RE: Decline of school run chaos in sight?
Thursday 14th October 2004
Decline of school run chaos in sight?
Government plans to encourage other modes of transport
If the government's plans come to fruition, driving while avoiding school run congestion should be less of a struggle for the rest of us. Education & Skills Secretary Charles Clarke and Transport Secretary Alistair Darling today unveiled plans for greener, safer and healthier ways to travel to school.
Mr Darling announced £10 million of Department for Transport funding to develop hundreds of safe walking and cycling routes to schools. The Links to Schools programme will extend the National Cycle Network, bringing it closer to schools and making it easier and safer for pupils to walk or cycle.
More than 230 schools will directly benefit via the funding to 100 local authorities. The grant is to be made to Sustrans, the sustainable transport charity, which has built the 8,000-mile National Cycle Network, and which will oversee the building of new links from the Network to schools around England.
Mr Clarke confirmed that a School Transport Bill will be introduced to Parliament today to enable up to 20 local education authorities to introduce new schemes to tackle the congestion caused by the traditional ‘school run,’ developing innovative ways for pupils to travel to school tailored to their local circumstances, with up to £200,000 Government funding to kick start each scheme.
The School Transport Bill would bring the first changes to school transport legislation in over 60 years, allowing local education authorities to develop innovative solutions to school transport problems, reducing traffic congestion and cutting pollution, through the use of, for example:
- safe cycle routes to schools, plugged into the national cycle network, with secure storage for bicycles at schools;
- ‘walking buses’ where pupils are collected from an agreed location, and then walk together to school escorted in safe groups by volunteers, with other pupils joining them en route;
- ‘park & stride’ schemes where parents drop children off at an agreed location to be escorted into school;
- more high quality school buses catering for more pupils, with features such as CCTV and well-trained drivers; as well as extra buses catering for pupils attending after school activities;
- staggered starting times with different schools in the same area staggering their starting times to reduce the number of cars on the road at any one time.
Mr Darling said:
"As well as being fun, cycling improves health, reduces school-gate congestion and pollution and provides our children with a sense of independence. But we need to persuade more children, and their parents, that they can cycle to school safely. Today's announcement is a real step in the right direction to persuade more children to cycle more safely, more often.
"School children across the country are set to benefit from the Links to Schools programme, made possible by a £10 million grant from my department, the largest ever cash injection for a project of this kind. The funding will help to develop hundreds of safe walking and cycling routes to schools around the country.
"We are determined to ensure that cycling and walking to school become a safe and healthy option for children and reassure parents that their children are safe when travelling to and from school. This investment builds upon the annual investment of more than £20 million a year which the Departments for Transport and Education are making in the Travelling to School initiative and will provide further help to children and parents who want to come to school without their cars.”
Mr Clarke said:
“Twice as many children are driven to school now in comparison with 20 years ago - around 40 per cent of primary pupils and 20 per cent of secondary pupils. Most of these journeys are less than two miles, meaning decreasing numbers of children walking or cycling with serious health implications in terms of lack of daily exercise and the growing proportion of children who are overweight.
“Our proposals would encourage local education authorities to come up with 21st century solutions to make walking, cycling and bus travel safe, green, healthy options for more schools and their pupils, while allowing authorities who are content with their current arrangements to retain them."
Today’s announcements build on innovative work to modernise school transport schemes across England which have been established under Travelling to School: An Action Plan. Launched in September 2003, the Action Plan has already spent £14 million in local education authorities and 2,400 schools to develop:
- dedicated school travel plans which offer safer routes to school, road crossings, local speed restrictions, dedicated cycle ways, secure cycle storage, sufficient locker space and improved public transport provision;
- road safety skills for pupils, particularly at primary schools, and cycle training;
- positive behaviour by pupils on public transport on their journeys to and from school;
- lessons through geography, PSHE, and citizenship to explain the benefits of sustainable travel;
- a network of over 250 school travel advisers in local authorities in England to provide expert advice to schools engaged in travel planning.
Discussion
What a load of PR b0ll0cks !
£10 million pounds to be given to sustrans - mmh wonder if they need to spend some of that on a new website !
There's nothing here to stop the school run.
A local primary school to me - had a drop off zone introduced - about 100m away from the school. Mind you at least they don't park on the blind hump back bridge anymore !
£10 million pounds to be given to sustrans - mmh wonder if they need to spend some of that on a new website !
There's nothing here to stop the school run.
A local primary school to me - had a drop off zone introduced - about 100m away from the school. Mind you at least they don't park on the blind hump back bridge anymore !
-ups! I wonder how many will use them?All of this has been done at the school next door to me and it has made very little difference. I suspect part of the problem is that a lot of fuss was made at first but now that a new set of children and their parents have joined the school the message isn't communicated.
The parents would happilly drive over other cars and children in order to collect or drop their own off within inches of the classroom.
The school is on a minor road with wide pavements etc. etc.
The parents would happilly drive over other cars and children in order to collect or drop their own off within inches of the classroom.
The school is on a minor road with wide pavements etc. etc.
Hmmmm... PH in government propaganda-spreading sensation! This is just straight Blairite anti-car spin, and PH ought to know better than to spread it without comment. What a load of b*llocks! All this does is waste lots more money on stupid cycle tracks that no-one will use (like the one painted on the road through the *INDUSTRIAL ESTATE* in Exeter, for Chrissake - anyone for wobbling along a two-foot wide lane in the dark while a 44-tonner thunders past, folks?). What the government seems to fail to grasp is that cycling in Britain is a SUPPLEMENT to car use, not a replacement for it. No-one in their right mind is going to cycle to school in the dark and the pouring rain between November and April, for a start - but people love going out to nice beauty spots with their bikes on the car roof for a bit of sport (which ADDS a bike journey to a car one!). This, like all the other Nu Labour anti-car supposedly 'green' measures won't do a thing to cut car use. What a load of rubbish. As someone else has just said, setting up viable school minibus system might be a step in the right direction - but that might cost proper money. Sheesh!!
(Quote) ''lessons through geography, PSHE, and citizenship to explain the benefits of sustainable travel''
Meant to say before - this is just a euphemism for incorporating anti-car propaganda into the school curriculum. It is absolutely outrageous political interference in education, and in reality tends to involve activities such as kids sitting round in circles brainstorming about the evils of the car, how much pollution and misery they cause, etc. (I know - I am an educationist!). This is an utter, utter waste of curriculum time (I am a modern languages specialist, and am currently outraged by the fact that languages have been made only optional from 14 onwards - replacing them with guff like this is absolutely appalling!). Allow stuff like this into the curriculum (as they have already) and Mr Blair's spin is reaching straight into the heart of each child at a nice, early age. 1984 already...
Meant to say before - this is just a euphemism for incorporating anti-car propaganda into the school curriculum. It is absolutely outrageous political interference in education, and in reality tends to involve activities such as kids sitting round in circles brainstorming about the evils of the car, how much pollution and misery they cause, etc. (I know - I am an educationist!). This is an utter, utter waste of curriculum time (I am a modern languages specialist, and am currently outraged by the fact that languages have been made only optional from 14 onwards - replacing them with guff like this is absolutely appalling!). Allow stuff like this into the curriculum (as they have already) and Mr Blair's spin is reaching straight into the heart of each child at a nice, early age. 1984 already...
Another quote: ''Mr Clarke said: Most of these journeys are less than two miles''
So?? I bet fatso Clarke doesn't walk four miles a day in the middle of winter. So who's he to go telling us that we should? This is reminiscent of old Two-Jags (remember him!) telling us we should cycle, use public transport, etc., and then driving his wife 200 yards 'to save her hairdo' (obviously us hoi polloi can walk, and to hell with our hair-dos!). Similarly, I will obey Charles Clarke's admonishments that I and/or my children should walk up to four miles a day only when I see him losing a few stone and looking like something other than a bladder of blubber. Sheesh again...
So?? I bet fatso Clarke doesn't walk four miles a day in the middle of winter. So who's he to go telling us that we should? This is reminiscent of old Two-Jags (remember him!) telling us we should cycle, use public transport, etc., and then driving his wife 200 yards 'to save her hairdo' (obviously us hoi polloi can walk, and to hell with our hair-dos!). Similarly, I will obey Charles Clarke's admonishments that I and/or my children should walk up to four miles a day only when I see him losing a few stone and looking like something other than a bladder of blubber. Sheesh again...
simonrockman said:
A major cause of the school run is the demise of the small, local, school. By building fewer bigger schools they are necessarily too far for many pupil to walk.
The same goes for hospitals.
Simon
True to a point, but the problem has also largely arisen because some parents have the cheek not to want to send their kids to the local school if it isn't much good (and many aren't!). If we are to avoid a return to the bad old days where you had to send the kids to the bog standard local dump, I can't really see how this can be avoided. It's a bit like some of my firends who bemoan the fact that a lot of families have two cars now, whereas in the 60s they made do with one - the reason, of course, is that many more women now have jobs and need mobility, and so both partners in a relationship need a car. As with the school run thing, it's hard to see how to solve the 'problem' without a return to the Dark Ages(and anyway I would argue that it isn't actually a problem at all, but merely a consequence of a better lifestyle which is exacerbated by governmental reluctance to spend money on the road infrastructure, preferring instead to spread anti-car propaganda in an effort to make motorists feel guilty). Sheesh again - I am quite annoyed today...
Spin or not, £10 million towards improving cycle and pedestrian access to schools has to be a good thing.
As a nation we've gone far too far down the 'playstation generation' route. I should know, I'm one of them. We all want to drive where we like, eat whatever shite we like, buy whatever we want when we want it, sod whether we can actually afford it etc and not suffer the consequences.
I don't care whether this is spin or not but I remember when I went to school we all either walked or cycled with our parents, barring the handful who couldn't for whatever varying reasons. It helped my friends and myself get a good basis in living reasonably healthily, incorporating basic exercise into our everyday lives without it being a burden. My parents benefitted from this exercise too.
I look at children growing up round my way today, and at the state my parents have got into now and it isn't a pretty sight. Kids that could easily walk or cycle to school don't bother. Cars line the roads. I accept that for some people finding an alternative to driving to school can be difficult. Hopefully this scheme will help provide a range of schemes including school buses (or some similar) to help provide a solution to as wide a range of senarios as possible.
Junk food/poor basic diet and a lack of exercise is leading a growing (and imho an unacceptable) number of people towards poor health and burdening the health service unnecessarily.
Getting basic exercise into everyday life is a must if this nation isn't to strangle itself on it's own gluttony. The way that this scheme seems to have been advertised is to pick up on this fact and draw it to the forefront of our attention. To deride anything that, although potentially flawed, targets such an important topic as child health and welfare is imho to stick one's head in the sand.
Bikes being an accessory to cars? Cycling in the dark being wrong? I'm sorry but I just can't buy into this school of thought. These are personal choices. I'd like to think that the gene pool will help satisfy this argument and society will cleanse itself. Problem is how long will we have to wait for good olf Ronald MacDonald to work his stuff?
Cream cake anyone?
As a nation we've gone far too far down the 'playstation generation' route. I should know, I'm one of them. We all want to drive where we like, eat whatever shite we like, buy whatever we want when we want it, sod whether we can actually afford it etc and not suffer the consequences.
I don't care whether this is spin or not but I remember when I went to school we all either walked or cycled with our parents, barring the handful who couldn't for whatever varying reasons. It helped my friends and myself get a good basis in living reasonably healthily, incorporating basic exercise into our everyday lives without it being a burden. My parents benefitted from this exercise too.
I look at children growing up round my way today, and at the state my parents have got into now and it isn't a pretty sight. Kids that could easily walk or cycle to school don't bother. Cars line the roads. I accept that for some people finding an alternative to driving to school can be difficult. Hopefully this scheme will help provide a range of schemes including school buses (or some similar) to help provide a solution to as wide a range of senarios as possible.
Junk food/poor basic diet and a lack of exercise is leading a growing (and imho an unacceptable) number of people towards poor health and burdening the health service unnecessarily.
Getting basic exercise into everyday life is a must if this nation isn't to strangle itself on it's own gluttony. The way that this scheme seems to have been advertised is to pick up on this fact and draw it to the forefront of our attention. To deride anything that, although potentially flawed, targets such an important topic as child health and welfare is imho to stick one's head in the sand.
Bikes being an accessory to cars? Cycling in the dark being wrong? I'm sorry but I just can't buy into this school of thought. These are personal choices. I'd like to think that the gene pool will help satisfy this argument and society will cleanse itself. Problem is how long will we have to wait for good olf Ronald MacDonald to work his stuff?
Cream cake anyone?
venom said:
Spin or not, £10 million towards improving cycle and pedestrian access to schools has to be a good thing.
As a nation we've gone far too far down the 'playstation generation' route. I should know, I'm one of them. We all want to drive where we like, eat whatever shite we like, buy whatever we want when we want it, sod whether we can actually afford it etc and not suffer the consequences.
I don't care whether this is spin or not but I remember when I went to school we all either walked or cycled with our parents, barring the handful who couldn't for whatever varying reasons. It helped my friends and myself get a good basis in living reasonably healthily, incorporating basic exercise into our everyday lives without it being a burden. My parents benefitted from this exercise too.
I look at children growing up round my way today, and at the state my parents have got into now and it isn't a pretty sight. Kids that could easily walk or cycle to school don't bother. Cars line the roads. I accept that for some people finding an alternative to driving to school can be difficult. Hopefully this scheme will help provide a range of schemes including school buses (or some similar) to help provide a solution to as wide a range of senarios as possible.
Junk food/poor basic diet and a lack of exercise is leading a growing (and imho an unacceptable) number of people towards poor health and burdening the health service unnecessarily.
Getting basic exercise into everyday life is a must if this nation isn't to strangle itself on it's own gluttony. The way that this scheme seems to have been advertised is to pick up on this fact and draw it to the forefront of our attention. To deride anything that, although potentially flawed, targets such an important topic as child health and welfare is imho to stick one's head in the sand.
Bikes being an accessory to cars? Cycling in the dark being wrong? I'm sorry but I just can't buy into this school of thought. These are personal choices. I'd like to think that the gene pool will help satisfy this argument and society will cleanse itself. Problem is how long will we have to wait for good olf Ronald MacDonald to work his stuff?
Cream cake anyone?
Ahh, the sound of a nail being struck firmly and squarely on the head, but knowing New Labour, the 'useful' bits of this plan will be quickly put back to some obscure date, whilst this bit...:
the article said:
lessons through geography, PSHE, and citizenship to explain the benefits of sustainable travel;
a network of over 250 school travel advisers in local authorities in England to provide expert advice to schools engaged in travel planning.
...Will almost certainly go ahead, and will basically be lessons in which kids are taught that cars are evil, enforced by the kind of lentilist (you know, the kind who are veggies, have a bike with a little seat on the back and an irritatingly accent-free and overly pure-sounding voice) hired by Labour and paid for by taxation.
WTFs going on with this country!
[quote=v8thunder]
[quote=venom]Spin or not, £10 million towards improving cycle and pedestrian access to schools has to be a good thing.
Bikes being an accessory to cars? Cycling in the dark being wrong?
I didn't say that bikes *should* be an accessory to cars. I said that this was the *effect* of the government policy of trying to increase cycle use - and it is. And like it or not, people do not like being told (by rich, smug Nu Lab technocrats) that they 'should' do things that are less pleasant and comfortable than what they do now. No-one likes going backwards, and they will not do it unless forced. My mother, who is 75, often lectures me about how much better life was in the 1930s when there was no TV and people used to sit round darning together - and I am sure it was better (I loathe TV). However, I observe that my mother does not now choose to darn and play scrabble by candlelight - she sits and watches TV all day, for the simple reason that TV can't be uninvented. I agree entirely that much of the population is disgustingly obese and unhealthy, but telling them, a la Norman Tebbit, to 'get on their bikes', will NOT solve anything. In addition, Blair and his creatures all want us to work harder for less money to produce more goods and pay more taxes, and cycling is not a viable means of transport in a society that demands more and more commitment from people in terms of time and effort, this forcing them to speed their lives up and do things as fast as they can (the same goes for buses - I work for publishers, to very tight deadlins, and whenever I go into Exeter I am told that I 'should' cycle or go by bus. Apart from the fact that there isn't a bus, the fact remains that if I did either of those things the journey would take me 2 hours instead of 40 minutes, and I just do not have that kind of time available). While I agree entirely that a more healthy lifestyle is a desirable thing, it will NOT be achieved by governmental spin, pressure and/or anti-car measures. like increased public transport use, it will only increase if people are *seduced* into using it - and none of what I see here sounds very seductive. I have to say that I used to have to walk 2 miles to school in the 60s (I am 46), but I remmeber it as an unremittingly cold, wet, dull and miserable experience, and if anyone had offered me an alternative then I would have jumped at it. In the light of that, it is hardly surprising that those who have an alternative now take it. And, as I also said, a lot of people have to do it because they have a long school journey (I have two kids - my daughter walks a mile to the bus stop and then catches the bus into Exeter and I take my son 5 miles by car to where he catches a bus to do the next 8 miles. This is forced on me because I committed the 'crime' of sending him to a school whose catchment area we don't live in (the local one is sh*t). Do I feel guilty? Nope...
[quote=venom]Spin or not, £10 million towards improving cycle and pedestrian access to schools has to be a good thing.
Bikes being an accessory to cars? Cycling in the dark being wrong?
I didn't say that bikes *should* be an accessory to cars. I said that this was the *effect* of the government policy of trying to increase cycle use - and it is. And like it or not, people do not like being told (by rich, smug Nu Lab technocrats) that they 'should' do things that are less pleasant and comfortable than what they do now. No-one likes going backwards, and they will not do it unless forced. My mother, who is 75, often lectures me about how much better life was in the 1930s when there was no TV and people used to sit round darning together - and I am sure it was better (I loathe TV). However, I observe that my mother does not now choose to darn and play scrabble by candlelight - she sits and watches TV all day, for the simple reason that TV can't be uninvented. I agree entirely that much of the population is disgustingly obese and unhealthy, but telling them, a la Norman Tebbit, to 'get on their bikes', will NOT solve anything. In addition, Blair and his creatures all want us to work harder for less money to produce more goods and pay more taxes, and cycling is not a viable means of transport in a society that demands more and more commitment from people in terms of time and effort, this forcing them to speed their lives up and do things as fast as they can (the same goes for buses - I work for publishers, to very tight deadlins, and whenever I go into Exeter I am told that I 'should' cycle or go by bus. Apart from the fact that there isn't a bus, the fact remains that if I did either of those things the journey would take me 2 hours instead of 40 minutes, and I just do not have that kind of time available). While I agree entirely that a more healthy lifestyle is a desirable thing, it will NOT be achieved by governmental spin, pressure and/or anti-car measures. like increased public transport use, it will only increase if people are *seduced* into using it - and none of what I see here sounds very seductive. I have to say that I used to have to walk 2 miles to school in the 60s (I am 46), but I remmeber it as an unremittingly cold, wet, dull and miserable experience, and if anyone had offered me an alternative then I would have jumped at it. In the light of that, it is hardly surprising that those who have an alternative now take it. And, as I also said, a lot of people have to do it because they have a long school journey (I have two kids - my daughter walks a mile to the bus stop and then catches the bus into Exeter and I take my son 5 miles by car to where he catches a bus to do the next 8 miles. This is forced on me because I committed the 'crime' of sending him to a school whose catchment area we don't live in (the local one is sh*t). Do I feel guilty? Nope...
sidevalve said:
Another quote: ''Mr Clarke said: Most of these journeys are less than two miles''
I keep hearing this. And I can't believe I'm hearing it. The average driver does 12,000 miles pa and most car journeys are under 2 miles according to the greens.
So the average driver does more than 12,000 / 365 / 2 = 16 journeys a day!
Are they sure they haven't twisted a "statistic" that said the average journey (not car journey) is under 2 miles?
Here's another thing that baffles me. They think that if you stop parents driving their kids to school you will cut rush hour congestion.
But you will still have all the parents that are teachers driving to school. And administrators. And assistants. And dinner ladies.
And you will still have all the lecturers and students mainly driving into college or uni in term time and not in the holidays. And all their administrative and ancilliary staff.
And, of course, all the parents in the NHS, Local government, civil service, etc who have parent friendly jobs and only work in term time and take all of the school vacations off.
And then, of course, you get all the other parents who take their holidays in the school holidays because they have kids at school.
And they think that the roads are busy in term time and quiet in the school holidays because of the school run!
But you will still have all the parents that are teachers driving to school. And administrators. And assistants. And dinner ladies.
And you will still have all the lecturers and students mainly driving into college or uni in term time and not in the holidays. And all their administrative and ancilliary staff.
And, of course, all the parents in the NHS, Local government, civil service, etc who have parent friendly jobs and only work in term time and take all of the school vacations off.
And then, of course, you get all the other parents who take their holidays in the school holidays because they have kids at school.
And they think that the roads are busy in term time and quiet in the school holidays because of the school run!
The school run congestion is just a symptom of the wider social malaise, that of the softening of society and what we expect of ourselves and our children.
We live in a society were the PC leftie's have been promoting the whole 'thinkofthechildren' drivel to such an extent that normal people now consider themsleves bad parents if they do not mollycoddle and provide everything and all to their precious but increasingly thankless brats.
Hence precious Billy cant do the 20 minutes stroll to school, in case he grows up with latent feelings of rejection and abandonment by his parents.
We live in a society were the PC leftie's have been promoting the whole 'thinkofthechildren' drivel to such an extent that normal people now consider themsleves bad parents if they do not mollycoddle and provide everything and all to their precious but increasingly thankless brats.
Hence precious Billy cant do the 20 minutes stroll to school, in case he grows up with latent feelings of rejection and abandonment by his parents.
sidevalve said:
Hmmmm... PH in government propaganda-spreading sensation! This is just straight Blairite anti-car spin, and PH ought to know better than to spread it without comment. What a load of b*llocks! All this does is waste lots more money on stupid cycle tracks that no-one will use (like the one painted on the road through the *INDUSTRIAL ESTATE* in Exeter, for Chrissake - anyone for wobbling along a two-foot wide lane in the dark while a 44-tonner thunders past, folks?). What the government seems to fail to grasp is that cycling in Britain is a SUPPLEMENT to car use, not a replacement for it. No-one in their right mind is going to cycle to school in the dark and the pouring rain between November and April, for a start - but people love going out to nice beauty spots with their bikes on the car roof for a bit of sport (which ADDS a bike journey to a car one!). This, like all the other Nu Labour anti-car supposedly 'green' measures won't do a thing to cut car use. What a load of rubbish. As someone else has just said, setting up viable school minibus system might be a step in the right direction - but that might cost proper money. Sheesh!!
Not remotely true.
I lived three and a half miles from Birmingham city centre. To drive in - an hour and a quarter. To cycle - 20 minutes. Saving 45 minutes was enough incentive to me to put a waterproof jacket on and get on my bike. If there advantages to a cycleway as opposed to an alternative, people will use them.
Anyone care to think that parents are driving kids to work because they have to go to work so can't afford the time to walk them there?
I wonder how many families now have both parents working? If this is the case then no amount of cycle paths are going to make parents walk their children to work!
Rob
I wonder how many families now have both parents working? If this is the case then no amount of cycle paths are going to make parents walk their children to work!
Rob
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