to ask if you've heard of School Streets, and whether you think it's a good idea?

[Toomuchstuffwillkillme]

I just caught a bit of 'Clean Air for Kids' on R4 about School Streets in Hackney. Had not heard about it. (Must listen to whole programme properly in a bit!)
Seems like the sort of thing we should all be thinking about? I appreciate actually getting car-loving parents on board might be difficult, and there are probably a lot of issues that would need ironing out, but worth a try?
hackney.gov.uk/article/4379/School-streets

It won't work in rural areas where some schools are on A roads and doing it in my local town would make it grind to a halt with many schools being on main roads through the town.

I don't think this would work. It sounds too chaotic. People live on the streets near schools, what if there's nowhere else for them to park? And as a PP said, sometimes there's several schools close together.

Our local primary is a big Victorian building set in the middle of hundreds of terraces. Everyone who lives there has a car and there is no off street parking. There's no way they could do this as there would be so many residents with cars anyway. To be fair though, most of the kids live in the terraces and walk anyway.

I live very near a school and would love this!

However, what would happen is that the streets just outside the exclusion zone would get jammed up instead. Because in my experience, parents don't give a shit about traffic safety, or other children who are walking, or local residents. They just want to get as close to school as is humanly possible in their cars.

my Kids school is a high street so it can’t be closed.
There are some lazy parents but there’s also parents who work and have to go straight on, parents who have moved since kids started that school, 2 kids at different schools, unsafe walking roads. It goes on and on.

I agree with what they are trying to achieve but I don't agree with them doing it - already children who are disabled and have to go to school in a car are different from the majority and this scheme would make them even more different. They may stand out because of poor attendance, of not being able to take part in all activities and this is just another way of making them stand out.

My child couldn't have walked the 250m or similar and didn't have a blue badge. I had no choice but to drive him because his school was 8 miles away with no public transport. He also cannot use public transport.

Some London boroughs are starting to trial this
love.lambeth.gov.uk/making-school-journeys-safer/

What about special schools or units that share a site with a standard school? And parents are dropping kids off to both?

a couple of schools in my area do that already.
it has been a great success.
it has made parents realise that walking 500m is no hardship made a big difference to parking issues in the area.
one school offers a walking bus from a shopping car park a few 100m away.
I assume there are accessability considerations.

Many councils on cost grounds are now encouraging parents to take their children to special schools themselves rather than providing transport on buses. Stopping that policy would get some cars off the road.

If you did it here (suburban London skirts) I'm pretty sure I'd end up marooned inside a circle of exclusions. Or trying to thread my way through country lanes and tiny residential streets in company with everyone trying to use a major arterial route.

The answer is to get people out of old polluting cars.

Hmmm as someone who misses out on eligibility for a blue badge by 2 points, but still struggles enough to have needed a very nearby parking space sometimes, I’m not too keen really

That's probably all well and good for schools that are suburbian, you can park on the outskirts and walk in fairly easily. What about schools in inner cities where parking is a nightmare in general? Our primary school is 3 miles away and is situated in a maze of streets, which are all double parked as it is. Parking 500 meters away would massively congest the area for residents and make pollution a lot more concentrated for children living in those streets.

How would it work for someone like me, a supply teacher who sometimes doesn't get to school until nearly 9a.m. due to the time I get the call? How could I possibly get an exemption permit for each school?

Meh, they did this in Edinburgh years ago. Lots of people had lots of reasons why it wouldn’t work, but it does. Everyone thinks their circumstances are unique, but they aren’t. There isn’t a huge problem with streets nearby being clogged up, because there is no space there anyway.

Even high streets can be closed a couple of hours a day, that happens all the time.

it's NOT the same as saying disabled people are lazy!
No, but people outside the car don’t see that, do they? I can guarantee people assume I’m being lazy driving DD to school.

supply teacher who sometimes doesn't get to school until nearly 9a.m. due to the time I get the call?
That’s up to the school to manage. What if the supply teacher lived an hour away, they wouldn’t make it for 9am either.

*All you are realistically going to do with this is move the traffic and parking problems further from the school gates, and annoy people.

But the current system causes bad traffic and parking problems near to the school gates, so why is this a greater problem? It would have the distinct advantage of helping parents to realise that it won't kill them or their children to walk the last stretch of the journey.

"Even high streets can be closed a couple of hours a day, that happens all the time."

And A roads that are trunk roads between major towns? I can see that working well.

All it is doing is shifting the problem.

My view is that school transport should be provided.

Ridiculous idea and badly thought out.

I also resent the idea that everyone who drives to school is simply lazy.

Where my ds goes to school there are 5 primary schools all within a few streets of one another. So you have to close of the whole area.

We live a good 30 minute walk from school, I have to drop the dc off at 7.30am to get to work by 8. I only just manage it. I'm already on flexible hours.

How would it work for the primary school my dd went to?

On a major road. No car park. Parents drop off by parking in bays at the side of the road - kind of like a wide pavement area just outside the school. Speed limit is reduced to 20mph outside the school at pick up and drop off times.

Close that road and you’re closing an A road.

No pavement along most of the road to walk on.

How would It work?

Everybody has an excuse. Nobody gives a flying fuck about kids sitting in their classrooms breathing in petrol & diesel fumes from your idling cars—but never mind, you have places to be! You couldn’t possibly be expected to inconvenience yourselves for the benefit of your children!!!

Would you prefer people to loose their jobs so that they can walk their kids? Will you pay the fines for the siblings that are constantly late because they were allocated a different school?

I think what we should be working on is the ridiculous idea that children shouldn't walk to school without a parent until they are 10/12/65.
Many children who are driven right up to school, parked up somewhere antisocial, and waited with in the playground should be capable of being dropped off somewhere further away and being waved off to walk into school themselves, allowing the parent to drive on instead of clogging up the residential streets.

Userx - quite! No-one wants to look at the bigger picture. Something has to be done about pollution, and at least this is a start. We can't all put our own interests first all of the time.