The 8:40 problem and why I hate school drop off
For those who know me, you will know we have four children - three adult one 15 year old at home and at school. Almost feel like empty nesters...except we still do the occasional school drop off.
Today was the first day of Term 4.
I know this because I dropped Z off rather than him scooting...tell you one thing...in the last two weeks it seemed a large number of parents in the country forgot how to drive.
It wasn't one thing. It was a combination of things that seemed different today. No indicators. A U-turn across three lanes of regret. A large SUV parked on yellow lines with its hazard lights on, because hazard lights make it legal. At least one driver who was plainly lost, at a school their child has attended for four years.
I was one of them. I plan transport for a living and I still sat in that queue feeling personally wronged by it. I was not stuck in traffic. I was traffic.
So I did what I do when I’m annoyed. I looked up the numbers.
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32 percent. The share of New Zealand primary school kids who were driven to school in 1990.
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57 percent. The share a generation later, in the Ministry of Transport’s 25 year travel survey.
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42 down to 29. The percentage who walked.
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12 down to 2. The percentage who biked. Two. We went from a bike shed to a bike.
Sort of a scary down turn, especially when we factor health into it as well. If we look at one school here is what it looks like:
Take 400 kids. If 57 percent arrive by car, that is 228 children. Allow for siblings sharing and call it 175 cars. Nobody arrives at 8:15. Everybody arrives at 8:40. So those 175 cars turn up inside about 15 minutes, which is one car every five seconds at one gate.Park them nose to tail and you need about a kilometre of kerb. The school has 80 metres and a bus stop.
That is the 8:40 problem.
It is not a road problem.
No road outside a primary school was built to take motorway volumes for a quarter of an hour, and none ever should be.
The road is fine at 8:10. It is fine at 9:05. For fifteen minutes it is the busiest place in the suburb, and the people it is busiest for are four feet tall.
Here is the part I find hard to argue with. We drive them because the road outside school feels unsafe. It feels unsafe because of all the cars. The cars are us.
I’m not going to sell my car and buy a cargo bike - although we cycle a lot and my son does lime scooter it. But some families live five kilometres out. Some are going on to work. Some mornings are simply a shoe hunt with a deadline.
But the cheap fixes are sitting right there. Here are some of them:
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Drop them 300 metres short. Park one street back and walk the last bit. You skip the queue and they arrive awake.
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Use the new rule. Since 1 October, kids up to 12 can ride on the footpath with an adult alongside. That was written for exactly this trip.
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Fix the last 500 metres first. One good crossing and a slow street outside the gate will do more than any amount of parent education.
In the meantime, it gets better by Wednesday. It always does. By then we will all have remembered where the school is!!!
Keen to see what others have experienced...and bonus points if it was your bad driving!
Til next time
Andrew
Transit Trends · Andrew Collings, KA Advisory. Read and comment on the original on LinkedIn.
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