Memorandum submitted by Living Streets
(ST 7)
INTRODUCTION
Living Streets is a national charity (formerly
the Pedestrians Association) that promotes walking and assists
all those involved in the design, maintenance and management of
streets and public spaces to improve conditions for people on
foot.
WALK TO
SCHOOL
Living Streets jointly organises the national
Walk to School campaign, in partnership with Travelwise, a network
of local authorities. Walk to School started in 1995, and involves
up to two million parents and children, promoting the health,
social, and environmental benefits of walking to and from school.
The views expressed here are solely those of Living Streets
OVERALL IMPRESSION
The School Transport Bill is a technical fix
to a problem. It overlooks simpler and more cost effective solutions—walking
and cycling. This admission is even more glaring at a time when
the Department for Transport are about to launch the Active Travel
Strategy. This strategy prioritizing walking and seeks to get
children more physically active. Putting children onto buses will
do nothing to tackle the obesity problem.
Below we have set out a more detailed analysis
in concerns detailed to the bill.
BACKGROUND
The reasoning behind the School Transport Bill:
We applaud efforts by DfES and DfT to work together
on the issue of school travel and to share the objective of reducing
the number of car trips involved in school travel. This is a ground-breaking
step forward. By considering home-to-school transport provision
alongside all areas of school transport, it should be possible
to change overall travel patterns to and from school.
It is understood that whilst costs for current
school transport are increasing, less children are using the services.
There is clearly a need to consider whether current forms of provision
are as efficient and cost-effective as they can be.
Will the School Transport Bill resolve these issues?
1. For most children, walking is the most
viable and healthy means of transport for the school journey
The DfES has stated that it is keen to increase
the number of children walking and/or cycling to school. It is
therefore important that the Bill and the guidance that accompanies
it, does not portray walking as either unrealistic or last ditch
option. It would be detrimental for the Bill to promote bus services
as the overall solution to excessive car use for school travel.
Instead, bus travel must be presented as one of options in the
minority of cases where walking is not realistic for the whole
journey.
While the Bill might perhaps be more aptly named
the School Bus Bill, its content does still hold out much greater
possibilities than the school bus scenario suggests.
Within reasonable limits (allowing for rural
schools with large catchment areas), walking and cycling must
be the priority, not the afterthought.
— Safety, accessibility, and attractiveness
of routes for walking and cycling must be addressed—their
absence must not be simply accepted.
— When routes to school are described
as unsafe, this problem should receive the same attention and
creative thinking as the problem of poor commercial bus provision
or transport contracting difficulties.
— If children's bags are described
as too heavy to walk with, we should be asking why, and looking
at practical solutions like locker provision for pupils.
Continued failure to statutorily prioritise
walking and cycling results in solutions that only increase the
proportion of pupils shared between cars, buses and trains, and
do not create modal shifts away from these forms of transport.
Living Streets has recently published "Safer
Journeys to School", a Do-It-Yourself guide to assessing
the route to school for children and their carers. This gives
practical suggestions on how to improve walking routes to school—a
more sustainable and cost-effective method than extra bus provision.
In this context, we see the delegation of control
to local education authorities as very positive, given their scope
to create integrated solutions, for example addressing the streetscape
in the 2-3 mile radius around the school, as well as transport
provision.
An improved local environment to encourage walking—which
might include upgraded pavements, pedestrian-friendly crossings,
lower speed limits, more attractively laid out streets with better
and thus safer lighting, "live" street frontage, and
more trees and public art—is in the long run cheaper to
maintain, and offers more benefits to the community at large than
expenditure on increased bus transport.
2. Statutory walking distances
No new maximum distances have been provided
as a part of the Bill. We would agree with the need for some change
to the distances, but echo the Transport Select Committee's[1]
conclusion that limits remain appropriate as they clearly signal
that walking (or cycling) is possible and desirable beneath such
limits.
Given that nobody appears willing at this time
to suggest an alternative limit or engage with the implications
of such a change we believe that the pilot schemes facilitated
by the Bill should have as one of their objectives the testing
of alternative statutory limits. These could be related to different
modes (walking, cycling), and the expected outcome would be new
national limits to be established at the end of the pilot period.
In the short term, however, the bus strategy
presents a key risk. In the U.K. four in every five primary school
children live within 2 miles of their school and their average
trip length is 1.4 miles. We are concerned that new transport
provision focusing on buses may replace walking trips to the school
and not the car trips, especially if the buses have pick-ups close
to the school. By failing to address walking and cycling specifically,
the Bill is in danger of creating modal shift from walking to
bus use within the 3 mile radius, rather than from car driven
to more sustainable school journeys.
3. Long term viability
Transport of any type will be expensive to provide:
vehicles, drivers, fuel, insurance etc. The running costs may
fall on parents lacking the means to pay for this especially if
they have more than one child at the school. Families in a range
of income brackets may find—or may perceive—the bus
to be more expensive than their car journey. In fact at the same
time that car travel has become 5% cheaper trains are 3% more
expensive and buses are 8% more expensive since 1997 (response
to parliamentary question quoted in Observer 21 March 2004 We
are concerned that even if greater reliance on bus transport offers
a partial or interim solution, the subsidies required to keep
costs reasonable may not be economical in the long term, and alternative
solutions will still be needed.
While we recognize that bus or other provision
is necessary for children living beyond a certain distance (currently
two or three miles according to age), we believe that school transport
must be addressed as a whole. This Bill, and the discussion around
it suggest the DfES and DfT wish to take a holistic approach,
yet the Bill represents a missed opportunity to do so. Modal shifts
in the travel patterns of those within the 3 mile radius away
from car and bus use present as many, if not more, opportunities
to reduce school transport costs and create sustainable travel
behaviour. The failure of the Bill to prioritise walking and cycling
specifically—referring only to "different ways of travelling"[2]—means
that the bill does not address the key shifts required to reduce
car use and overall traffic on the school run.
The travel patterns children learn will stay
with them. A legacy of healthy children, and walkable neighbourhoods
is more valuable, more sustainable and a great deal less costly
to realise than one of increased traffic volume—not to provide
for this within the Bill would be a lost opportunity.
OTHER CONCERNS
WITH THIS
BILL
1. Borrowing an idea but not the culture it
came from
The approach (as presented in the technical
press) is similar to the yellow buses deployed in US cities. These
cities are of very low urban densities in comparison with UK towns
and cities and the buses are needed because of the relatively
low numbers of pupils living within walking distance of their
school.
2. Segregated provision for children
We believe that children gain from contact with
adults. They learn social skills and patterns of behaviour helpful
to their own development as citizens able to participate in society.
They also learn road safety skills (particularly in the course
of being escorted to school) that equip them to make independent
journeys as adolescents. Many child development experts attribute
the peak in child road fatalities and injuries at the beginning
of secondary school to a failure to develop sufficient road safety
skills in younger children. We are concerned that the new transport
provision, focusing on school buses, could have the effect of
cutting children off from gaining these experiences and skills.
Further, children themselves often react negatively
to specialist provision. Surveys have shown that there may be
a stigma or embarrassment factor attached to being bussed around,
though this may be connected to the notion that these will be
the yellow buses. We are concerned that in a society where even
three year olds know what is "cool" to wear, the buses
may encounter resistance.
3. Would Local Authorities Want to be the
"Odd One Out"?
The pilot asks Local Authorities to volunteer
to be a part of this initiative, yet the incentives to do so seem
limited. Those local authorities will have to put themselves forward
as areas which no longer provide "free" transport to
all pupils who live further than three miles away from their school.
This is likely to have substantial political implications for
them.
4. Lack of Support for Local Authorities
It seems unrealistic that pilots can be encouraged
and sustained on a cost and staff neutral basis. With the only
new revenue source being new charges for transport, the introduction
of such charges is thus incentivised, to the detriment of other
measures (including promoting walking) that would create more
savings in the long term. We are also concerned that the mismatch
between the lack of resources and specific guidance from the Government
on one hand, and their ability to permit, revoke or end pilot
schemes on the other, make the political and economic costs of
a pilot prohibitive.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. The Bill should explicitly refer to walking
and cycling in Article 2, para (2) (c). Moreover, a clear hierarchy
of desirable modes of school travel should be made explicit, with
walking followed by cycling, then bus (or train) travel and then
car use. Local authorities undertaking pilots should have a statutory
duty to improve walking and cycling options as priority, as well
as taking any other necessary measures such as providing better
bus provision for pupils living further away. Failure to explicitly
promote these two modes results in continued tinkering around
the edges of the sustainable transport challenge and the obesity
"epidemic" our communities face.
2. Any new school bus schemes should not
have pick-ups closer than the 1.4 miles that currently constitutes
an average trip length.
3. The trial scheme should be expanded both
in terms of scope and support provided:
— there should be resources attached
to it, to offset the administrative costs as well as risks, and
to avoid overreliance by Local Authorities on the introduction
of charges;
— more explicit guidance and advice
should be provided to Local Authorities;
— and the Government should consider
extending the trial scheme should be extended for a longer period
to evaluate the long-term effectiveness of this form of new school
transport.
4. Indeed Living Streets would argue that
guidance or statutory measures or targets to this effect, focused
on LEAs, could produce more profound results between now and 2010,
than 20 pilot schemes (out of a total of some 400 potential LEAs)
between 2006 and 2010. Currently reducing car use is not a statutory
requirement but just an option, with limited incentives[3]
for schools only, from which only limited results can be reasonably
expected.
5. Creating and testing new statutory walking
or cycling distances should be an explicit objective of at least
some of the schemes, with a view to updating the statutory limits
at the end of the pilot period.
6. At the end of this period and considering
the evaluation of the pilots, a clear strategy should be put in
place, which should be adopted nationally. We would like to see
the DfES as more responsible for the Bill and its implications,
in order to avoid abortive and wasteful pilot efforts, and subsequently
to avoid policies which are subject to too great variation throughout
UK local authorities.
1 Report of the House of Commons Transport Committee
on "School Transport", 31 March 2002, Eighth Report
of Session. Back
2
Draft School Transport Bill, Article 2, para (2) (c), Department
for Education and Skills, 2004. Back
3
£5,000 if a school adopts targets in this regard. Back
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