Featured in the Future Transport London Newsletter September 2024
September is traditionally Back To School, but it’s not just children who feel the onslaught of term-time. Who hasn’t noticed the difference between the empty roads during the long summer holidays and the traffic of term-time?
The school run is a surge of vehicles all travelling between 8-9am, on top of rush hour traffic. This pushes roads past their capacity, creating congestion, pollution and road danger, alongside bus delays. It creates a challenging environment for children to make their way to school – 75 per cent of London’s children walk or cycle to school - but affects everyone.
So how do we solve it? It’s a complex issue, with many factors:
● Parents with onward journeys to work after the school drop off.
● Parents with two drop offs, children at different schools.
● Families that don’t go straight home, but have after-school clubs.
But we think there are probably four key elements:
1. Understanding pupil journeys.
How far are pupils travelling? This is the biggest determinant of how they will travel. A London primary school with a mile catchment needs safe walking and cycling routes. A primary school where children travel an average of 2.5 miles needs more extensive walking and cycling routes, plus access to a school bus. Understanding these journeys informs the right travel solutions, and measuring pupil travel enables progress to be targeted and monitored.
We created our London primary school travel dashboard to provide information on distances travelled / driving rates by school, ward, borough.
2. Safe routes infrastructure.
All schools need to have safe routes for pupils to get to school. This enables pupils to walk or cycle independently from an early age. It is difficult to use comparatives due to school types but in Germany 76 per cent of children are allowed to travel home independently vs 25 per cent in the UK. Independent travel has been shown to benefit children’s physical and mental health. With the most common family pattern being two working parents, it also provides benefits to parents not having to do the same journey twice a day.
3. Collective school travel.
Schools provide wraparound care to accommodate modern working patterns, however the journey to school is still dependent on individual families making each journey. We think the trend for ‘bike buses’ to school needs to be formalised, scaled and enabled. If every school had three to four staffed cycle routes this would enable parents to avoid the school run and go straight to work. Children could join a bike bus at the end of their road for a healthy start to their day. Parents get time and productivity. Less pollution and carbon emissions mean there are health and environmental wins too. Formalised collective travel - walking buses, bike buses or school buses - is an investment that would have many positive outcomes.
4. Adoption of E bikes
Electric cargo bikes are revolutionising family travel. Different styles accommodate different families. Long tail can seat two to three children up to the age of ten on the back, covered and protected from the rain. Three wheelers that carry on the front can take newborns, your dog and your five year old. Parents are in control of the bike, children are contained, safe and dry. They have an important role to play in keeping families cycling rather than driving. Hammersmith and Fulham council have recently provided a significant subsidy scheme to families and it would be interesting to see how this develops.
* We run Cargos & Cakes, events to introduce families thinking about buying a cargo bike to families that already have one, to chat about how it works for them.
We believe solving the school run is complicated, but entirely possible. And by doing so we will improve the health and wellbeing of children, grown ups and the environment.
Nicola Pastore
Listen to Nicola answering questions on our podcast at https://www.futuretransportlondon.org/podcasts
Comments