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posted by martyb on Thursday August 27 2020, @07:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow dept.

School run: Cutting car use will take much more than educating children and parents:

As the summer holidays come to an end and children return to school following lockdown, there couldn't be a better time for us to consider the school commute. Nowadays, many children in the UK commute to school by car. But getting more parents to ditch the car for school journeys and switch to more active modes of travel, such as walking or cycling, is of great public health importance.

[...] As cities have expanded under suburban sprawl, commuting distances to school have increased. They are longer now than they have ever been before. This is another reason more children travel to school by car now than they used to. Less than half of all children in England attend their most local school.

An education policy that lets parents choose their child's school compounds the issue of suburban sprawl. Those parents that are able to exercise choice do so, and in some cases travel great distances so that their child attends the best-performing school. Once school choice has been decided, so too has children's mode of travel to school. Longer school commutes equals more car travel.

[...] Tackling the real causes of car dependency on the school commute would benefit children, society and the environment. It would solve several public health challenges.

If all children attended their local school, fewer children would travel by car, and because of this, fewer children would be injured on the roads. There would be less noise pollution and less air pollution, which would reduce children's risk of developing respiratory conditions. We would see more people speaking to each other on our streets because of the increase in footfall, and there would be an improved sense of safety because there would be more "eyes on the street."

Will eliminating school choice for children make them healthier?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 28 2020, @03:03PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday August 28 2020, @03:03PM (#1043345) Journal

    > Or is this more about parents being over protective and believing there is a pedo outside every school looking to kidnap their children?

    Yes. Helicopter Mommy fears that the streets are swarming, just swarming I tell you, with thieves, rapists, murders, perverts, and mentally unstable and violence prone nut cases. And that crossing the street is just asking to be run over.

    While I disagree with the fearmongering about all the criminals lurking, just waiting for an opportunity, I agree that busy streets are a problem. The southern US is the worst for neglecting all other forms of transportation in favor of the private automobile, because the big cities in the south all had a lot of population growth during peak car worship, thanks largely to another invention that took off in the 1950s, the A/C, which made living in the south a lot more comfy.

    Lot of people look down on walking as a last resort means of transportation, used regularly only by the desperately poor. But walking for exercise, that's rich. In any case, walking is made a lot more tedious by sprawl and fences. Another thing about the area of the US I'm in is that everyone is mad for fences. Some fences serve no purpose but to make it more difficult to walk places. One of the crazier ones is two apartment complexes, adjacent, no street between them, but separated by a fence. You wouldn't even know that they are two different complexes if not for the fence. However, the fence ends at the creek in the back, and people have worn a path in the grass from going around the end. Lot of strip mall tenants take the attitude that a pedestrian is not a spender. Making it difficult to walk to the mall by fencing off all approaches other than the street entrances, tilts things towards car owners, who are thought to be more desirable customers.

    I once proposed changing city ordinances to allow gaps in the fencing, for pedestrians. The gaps would not be required, merely allowed. Just giving strip mall management another option, that's all. One of the mall tenants was listening, and he went nuts, ranting about how making it easier for pedestrians would lead to more vandalism and accidents, and would force rents and insurance rates to go up, etc. I now realize that approach is a hard sell. People hate change, unless the status quo is terrible. Instead of trying to change an existing neighborhood, a new neighborhood has to be built with the changes from the old neighborhood already in place, before the first resident moves in. And even then, the residents may soon roll back the changes, to the extent the design of the neighborhood permits.

    The privacy fence that is so loved by home owners serves to give us more freedom to do what we want in our back yards. I once complained to the city that it seems people with fences have more rights than those without. To my dismay, he agreed. The city and the neighbors won't complain about what they can't see. Want to hang up laundry to dry? Mow the yard less often? Start a flower garden with colors that are not approved by the fascist Home Owner's Association? Better put up a fence, if you don't have one already.

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