Ship of Fools: Don't drive!

Thread: Don't drive! Board: Purgatory / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

This is specifically targetted at parents driving children to school. London parents will get fined for dropping kids at school.

I rather like the idea of discouraging needless driving. Pollution. Forcing users to pay fee for service.

Fines which hurt are more likely to cause behaviour change. I see very few kids walking to school these days, unlike 30 and 50 years ago when everyone walked.

It would probably be good to inhibit cars with additional fees and fines from many other places. Congestion charges are in place in some places. Do they exist where you live? What do you think?

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
This is specifically targetted at parents driving children to school. London parents will get fined for dropping kids at school.

So if I'm driving to work, and I drive past my kid's school, it's illegal to drop him off?

Charge for congestion, sure. Tax fuel, sure. But there's no difference in the environmental, congestion, or whatever effects of driving to school vs work, the supermarket, or anywhere else, where's the justification to treating them differently?

Posted by anoesis (# 14189) on :

As always, things are more complicated than the policy wonks allow for.

There are no fines for picking up or dropping off children by car at schools here in NZ, but there are other ways of pressuring people. At the first school my children went to, the children were issued with a sort of 'passport' thingy, which they got clipped, like a bus ticket, when arriving at the school gate, having been seen to approach on foot. They accumulated points like this, which could be exchanged for trivial prizes. All very nice-sounding. They had to have come from 400m or further away, to qualify as having walked to school. Bad luck for kids who actually live closer than this, no prizes for you. Bad luck also, for kids like my own, who had working parents and were in before-school care. I'm not going to walk my child to school at 7am and then walk back home, just in order to get in my car and drive my other child to daycare, and then go on to work. So my kid missed out on the prizes too. I hate that there are these assumptions that every kid has a 'mom' at home who can walk to and fro with them at the massively work-unfriendly starting and finishing times schools still maintain, and that all this driving is a choice, based on laziness and intransigence.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

I am deeply troubled by the act of labeling illegal something that is perfectly legal. Dropping a dead body off at an abandoned mineshaft, maybe. But dropping one's kid off at school?

What's next? Being fined for dropping Granny off at the doctor's when she could easily have called Dial-A-Ride?

Posted by Og, King of Bashan (# 9562) on :

Our neighborhood schools are old, and built right into the middle of the residential areas. So if you have too many parents dropping kids off, it turns into a horrible traffic jam.

Rather than imposing fines, the city has gone out of its way to make the streets near the schools safer for bicycles and pedestrians. Lots of cross walks, wide bike lanes, traffic islands to slow people down, and strict speed control. And they have installed extra bicycle racks at the schools

It works pretty well. I'm rarely down there when school is starting, but when I have been there, you see a lot of kids on foot, scooters, skateboards, and bicycles.

Posted by Palimpsest (# 16772) on :

Nice to know that rather than redoing the traffic so only handicapped and official cars can drive, they're arranging it so the rich can still drive while the peasants walk.

Posted by Gee D (# 13815) on :

It's horses for courses, or perhps Ma's for cars. It depends - you may be in an area where the steps taken by Og's local council are suitable. Very few are like that here and those in relevant power seem disinclined to take such steps.

When I was going to school, many of us were able to walk or cycle most of the time. Some came from suburbs down the line, and walked/cycled to their local station, then took the train. A parent would perhaps accompany a 6 or 7 year old, very few after that age. These days, so many are collected by car because the population of the overall area has increased greatly and that area has expanded. Then the catchment has grown, and I gather that quite a few boys now travel daily from the Northern Beaches. Some of this can be covered by school-provided buses, but not all - so a parent will drive instead. This in suburban Sydney, and even more the case in outer-suburban and country areas.

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

It would have made life very difficult for me. I dropped my two off at school on my way to work - there would have been no time to walk to and from school and not be late for work.

I agree that fewer cars is better, but until one wage will sustain a family how do we juggle the time?

A couple of years later my husband was home full time and easily able to walk the kids to school until they were old enough to walk themselves.

Few people have such luxury.

Posted by L'organist (# 17338) on :

Where I live villages which have their own primary school have a 'walking bus', a supervised crocodile of children who walk a set route to-and-from school. They arrive at school half-an-hour before lessons start and leave either as school finishes or after the post-school activity. They are organised through the Home-School Association and it means working parents have a safe and secure way of getting their offspring to school and home again which doesn't compromise the working day. Parents beyond the reach of the walking bus are encouraged to make car-share arrangements, which has the added bonus of parents and children in fairly isolated houses getting to know and socialise with others they might not get to know otherwise.

Secondary school (age 11-18) is a different matter because the catchment area is much larger. There are school buses which pick up from the larger villages but this still means some children having a lengthy walk (2+ miles) or being collected from the school bus drop-off by car.

So far the local authority has kept the school buses but they have cut the number so children from outlying villages are prevented from taking part in after-school activities unless parents can cobble together a car-share arrangement. And none of that solves the problem of children being expected to walk down unlit country lanes with no pavement for more than 2 miles in the dark.

As for the London school plan: where I used to live in the capital the road outside the school had resident only parking on both sides of the road: parents dropping off their children caused unbelievable problems.

Posted by mr cheesy (# 3330) on :

It might help to read the articles before commenting. This is not London-wide, it is not a ban from parent dropping off their kids at school, etc.

These particular schools have traffic and parking problems, to the extent that residents cannot get out of their own drives. As as result the local authority has changed the layout of the road to prevent parents from dropping off immediately in front of the school. If you want to drop your kids off, you have to drop them a bit further away or you get a fine.

The kids have to walk a few yards further for everyone's safety. What's the big deal?

Posted by Stejjie (# 13941) on :

My daughters' schools (Infant (4-7 years old) and Junior (7-11 years old) schools that share a site but are, until next month, separate schools) have yellow zig-zag lines outside where parking is prohibited from 8am-5pm, or something similar. I must admit, I thought this was universal outside schools in the UK - apparently not.

But these yellow zig-zags only seem to cover the barest minimum of roadspace outside, and there's a gap between the two sets of zig-zags. And the traffic and parking is still a nightmare and horrendously unsafe: people park as close as possible to the start/end of the zig-zags and there have been several near-misses of cars nearly hitting children.

As well as that, the roads are narrow and there's a large grammar school that backs on to the junior and infants schools - it's horrific.

There's ample parking, much of it free, which is comfortably within walking distance of the school, so there's no need to create a situation which is unsafe for children going to school and a nightmare for residents who live on the road (who don't have drives and must therefore park on the road).

So this plan sounds very sensible and necessary; the alternative is creating, in the name of convenience, a potential death-trap for children.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

As mr cheesy said, this doesn't apply to most parts of London. I live near half a dozen schools, and there is no change. There is severe congestion every day, and the parking wardens seem to turn a blind eye to some parking on yellow lines, but I guess that it sort of works, as the congestion is for a very short period.

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
As mr cheesy said, this doesn't apply to most parts of London. I live near half a dozen schools, and there is no change. There is severe congestion every day, and the parking wardens seem to turn a blind eye to some parking on yellow lines, but I guess that it sort of works, as the congestion is for a very short period.

The congestion may be for short periods each day but at those times you have hundreds of vehicles, driven by people who are in a hurry plus hundreds of children crossing roads, which makes for trouble (if not tragedy). Our local schools have a hell of a job getting crossing patrols, not because they can't get the funds but because too few people want to step in front of Chelsea tractors driven by maniacs.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

Last year there was a report of a school in Kent where parents were driving along the footpath to get to the head of the queue to pick up their children. (It was a path separated from the road by a grass verge.) The head filmed them.

We used to have a parent who parked up in the school drive entrance, across the path put in to give disabled children a route across the premises. Requests to move were met with unbelieving stares.

Posted by anoesis (# 14189) on :

quote:
Originally posted by L'organist:
Where I live villages which have their own primary school have a 'walking bus', a supervised crocodile of children who walk a set route to-and-from school. They arrive at school half-an-hour before lessons start and leave either as school finishes or after the post-school activity. They are organised through the Home-School Association and it means working parents have a safe and secure way of getting their offspring to school and home again which doesn't compromise the working day.

There were a few walking school buses operating at my daughter's first school, also. (the one I referred to in my previous post). Problem is, they left at 8.20am for school (by which time I needed to be parking my car half a mile from work, many miles away, having dropped off a younger child at daycare), and departed school to begin the meander home again, at 3.10pm. So, no earthly use to working parents at all. It used to confuse the hell out of me how completely oblivious the school seemed to be to the two-parents-working thing, given that we lived in a suburb that was in no way salubrious - but in fact, only a very small proportion of the pupils were enrolled in the before and after school care programme. After a while, I realised the missing piece of the puzzle was Grandmas. The whole social and economic fabric of this country is pretty much being held together by the unpaid work of Grandmas, I think. And if our housing situation gets any worse, that won't work in a generation's time, because all the Grandmas will still be working full-time until they drop, due to the ridiculous costs of housing. Anyway, well off topic by now. Will shut up.

Posted by decampagne (# 17012) on :

Hmm, in a way I can see the value of this, although it is also somewhat illiberal!

I should say, for what it's worth, that this is the very outermost suburb of London, very much suburban rather than urban, and socially somewhat unlike most of the capital (Thatcherite and Brexit central, more or less). Politically its unusual too, as the local council (who I presume are repsonsible for this decision) is dominated not by political parties, like the vast majority of local councils in the UK, but by various alliances of residents' associations. So the request is likely to come from the residents of the roads concerned.

I am quite familiar with the exact location of one of the four schools concerned (I attended a secondary school nearby)- it's on a dead-end residential street that would only generally be driven along by the people who live there, or those going to the school. So, in that specific case, I can maybe see the value for local residents of reducing very localised congestion, and in that particular context, thinking of street layout and neighbourhood, think it MIGHT be a valid response. It means, I think ,that the kids would have to walk somewhat less than five minutes from the nearest through road.

As a more general principle though.....I am all in favour of discouraging kids being driven to school. But am not sure, as a general way, that this is the best way to go about it.

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
As as result the local authority has changed the layout of the road to prevent parents from dropping off immediately in front of the school. If you want to drop your kids off, you have to drop them a bit further away or you get a fine.

The kids have to walk a few yards further for everyone's safety. What's the big deal?

Here is a map of the zone around one of the schools. The article reports a parent complaining that she has to drop her child off 5 minutes walk from the school. As I read the map, the nearest point to the school outside the zone is the corner of Isis Drive and Severn Drive, which is two minutes walk from the school (and that two minutes doesn't involve any road crossings, assuming the child is dropped off on the northbound side of Severn Drive.)

This would still mean the parents would be driving past the front of the school in order to get to the drop-off point, of course.

quote:
Originally posted by anoesis:
And if our housing situation gets any worse, that won't work in a generation's time, because all the Grandmas will still be working full-time until they drop, due to the ridiculous costs of housing.

Unless Grandma moves in with the kids...

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

I have been thinking about this a lot - in principle I like the idea of discouraging driving to school. But then I think of a school I pass on my way into work.

It is a private school, set on a fairly narrow but busy road. There is no way that anyone is walking to school along that road, which is fine because parents always drive little Roberta there. In large 4x4s (on a narrow road. It's wonderful).

Of course, if they were charged for driving their little Eduardo to school, they would pay happily. And perfectly reasonably, because you cannot walk there.

So it would make no difference to this particular, high polluting, school drive. Which is a pity, because something that would encourage these parents to drive something less guzzling I would be all for.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

The specifics of driving to school do lead in the more general direction of a car-centric world.

There's a school in my city where the students leave the front door and walk mid-block to the shopping mall to buy lunch and snacks etc. There are ped crossings at the ends of the block, and police have tried to enforce bylaws (city laws) about not crossing except at the marked crossings, but when masses of students cross, they cannot do anything really. And under 18 years cannot be punished in court because it isn't criminal. The answer they've come up with is a fence. My thought is to remove the cars from the roadway during the times students cross (before, after school, lunch time, recesses), not to prevent the students from crossing. Because who owns the street? The people or the cars?

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
My thought is to remove the cars from the roadway during the times students cross (before, after school, lunch time, recesses), not to prevent the students from crossing. Because who owns the street? The people or the cars?

The people in the cars are also people.

The real solution (if I understand that the children cross the street directly in front of the school to get to a shopping centre) is to put a crossing there, rather than this weird insistence of only putting crossings at junctions.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
The people in the cars are also people.

True. But my point is that the default condition of roadways is that cars come first.

This is a high school, grades 9-12. The grade 12s usually paint a cross walk on the street themselves in June, just before grad (what is called "prom" elsewhere). The city dutifully sends out crews to wash the paint from the street. Every year.

Posted by Og, King of Bashan (# 9562) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
The real solution (if I understand that the children cross the street directly in front of the school to get to a shopping centre) is to put a crossing there, rather than this weird insistence of only putting crossings at junctions.

I always try to avoid one particular street on my drives around town, because it seems to be the most chaotic street in town. One of the major causes of the chaos is the sheer number of jaywalkers. I used to blame the concentration of jaywalkers on the fact that the street is home to a good number of the city's homeless drunks and junkies. But then I saw a study pointing out that there is only one crosswalk over the most chaotic two mile stretch of the road. Even if they wanted to walk with a signal, there aren't signals for them to use.

Better city planning could solve a lot of problems.

Posted by Gee D (# 13815) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:

quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
The people in the cars are also people.
True. But my point is that the default condition of roadways is that cars come first.

Generally speaking, cars come with people.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

Okay you miss the point. The road hierarchy has cars first, pedestrians and bicycles are below the cars which are king and queen of the road. Other roadway users violate laws and rules because infrastructure often requires them to navigate design not built for them. Whether bicycles or pedestrians. And just to be clear, bicycles also come with people.

We should not build infrastructure with one set of users as priority and everyone else as afterthought. Which is what we generally have.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
The parking wardens seem to turn a blind eye to some parking on yellow lines.

Everything depends on what the precise restrictions are. Your area may be "No parking" (indicated by lines on the road) but not "No loading" (indicated by lines on the edge of the kerb). They are different, there should be signs to say exactly what the situation is. I successfully campaigned some years ago to have the "No waiting" restriction removed outside a Sheltered Housing block where taxis had to often stop to drop off and pick up less-mobile residents.

[ 01. April 2017, 07:07: Message edited by: Baptist Trainfan ]

Posted by Gee D (# 13815) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Okay you miss the point.

We should not build infrastructure with one set of users as priority and everyone else as afterthought. Which is what we generally have.

1. I did not miss what you're calling your point.

2. Allocating priority between uses is a prime matter for the legislature - which has in turn delegated that to the executive minister.

Posted by Stejjie (# 13941) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Okay you miss the point. The road hierarchy has cars first, pedestrians and bicycles are below the cars which are king and queen of the road. Other roadway users violate laws and rules because infrastructure often requires them to navigate design not built for them. Whether bicycles or pedestrians. And just to be clear, bicycles also come with people.

We should not build infrastructure with one set of users as priority and everyone else as afterthought. Which is what we generally have.

I'd also add to this, that though cars come with people, those people tend to be a lot better-protected and able to do a lot more damage than the people outside of cars.

So people in cars have a double advantage: they have infrastructure that is normally gives them priority, and in a collision with people outside of cars are much less likely to come off worse.

Posted by St. Gwladys (# 14504) on :

I wish it were illegal to drop children off to our local junior school - which is at the end of my street. At school dropping off/picking up time, our street becomes nigh impassable. The street below us has a dropped kerb which means I can cross to drive my mobility scooter up the hill to my street - not at school time, there's usually a car parked across it. There's a lane behind our street - I've counted 8 cars parked there at school time which means that if my timing's off, I can't get through that way either.

Posted by Chorister (# 473) on :

At the last school where I worked, one parent solved the problem by dropping his child off by helicopter, landing on the school playing field!

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

quote:
As I read the map, the nearest point to the school outside the zone is the corner of Isis Drive and Severn Drive

Well, that's a trip down memory lane - I grew up around here. Suburban Essex, where the car is king (though it's the train that takes you dahn to Fenchurch St for work).

I guess I'll mention to my Mum when I'm down there on Good Friday, that a (global!) bunch of people on the web are busy dissecting Havering schools' parking policy!

Posted by simontoad (# 18096) on :

I had a 15 min walk to and from my Primary School. They were building Maroondah Hospital across from my house when I was young, so rather than walk down the footpaths, I used to climb up the slag heap and down the other side, walk to the concrete retaining wall and scramble up it, coming out just in front of my house. Some days I used to go down the tunnel with the spooky door. It was a real bummer when the hospital became operational, but I was still able to go down the tunnel and climb up the retaining wall. I swear that the spooky door was the entrance to the morgue.

I used to walk home with my friend Happy Hammond, and Tim Hancock, a year older than us, used to chuck lumps of clay and rock in our direction from the top of the slag heap. I perceived this as bullying at the time, and I was scared of Tim. The adult me reckons he was just trying to play with us. He grew into a nice and friendly bloke, whatever he did as a kid.

My Grandma, who lived on a farm in country Victoria, rode her horse to school. She was married in the 1920's, so I'm guessing that was in the 1910's.

Times change. Yesterday's Conformadore is today's School Utility Vehicle. I do hope the parent paranoia thing changes soon, he says as a non-parent.

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