School Holidays and Traffic

jbkenn

Drove in to town from Caherdavin this morning at 8.35, no holdup at LIT roundabout, no crawl to Hassett's Cross, no crawl to Sarsfield Bridge, usual ballsup on Sarsfield Bridge and Hentry Street lights, but, I arrived at Sarsfield Street lights 8.47.

The traffic difference? , no school traffic, question? do people radically alter their lifestyle during school holidays? does 80% of the working population take holidays to coincide with the school holidays?, people are back at work but the traffic is moving along nicely

Should we have a serious look at the amount of traffic generated by delivery of children to school? should we provide park and ride bus services for schools and ban delivery of children to schools by parents in cars?

jbkenn

sioda

Of course traffic is upped by school runs. I mean people carriers 4x4's all carrying 1 kiddie when next doors kid is doing the same its nuts. #

Car pooling needs to be looked at in relation to school runs

DublinWriter

Yup it has been pretty amazing this week. My usual 1hour+ commute has been reduced to 30 mins.

We should have a system like they do in the US for school buses for the suburbs. But being Irish we couldn't organise ourselves out of a paper-bag and it takes the death of several children for our government to legislate to make seat-belts compulsory on existing school-buses being run in the country.

Diddly diddly diddly let's leave it to market forces until kids die diddly diddly diddly etc.

jonski

Hmmm , how my opinion on this has changed over the years . I walked or cycled to school . When I started work I cursed the school traffic . then I had kids of my own at school going age and....... I wouldn't let them walk . You hear one or two stories , an un-marked white van , and true or false , it frightens the sh!t out of you . So , I am there to drop them off and there to collect them .

So , what to do , maybe have schools stagger their start times , but that would never happen .

iguana

jonski wrote:

Hmmm , how my opinion on this has changed over the years . I walked or cycled to school . When I started work I cursed the school traffic . then I had kids of my own at school going age and....... I wouldn't let them walk . You hear one or two stories , an un-marked white van , and true or false , it frightens the sh!t out of you . So , I am there to drop them off and there to collect them .

So , what to do , maybe have schools stagger their start times , but that would never happen .

You know that FAR more children die in road accidents than are abducted. The more traffic that is on the road the more accidents that there will be.

jonski

It's nothing to do with statistics , it's about peace of mind .

iguana

jonski wrote:

It's nothing to do with statistics , it's about peace of mind.

You get greater peace of mind from protecting your children from a tiny risk while exposing them to a far greater one which is also contributing to the decline of the only planet they will ever have to live on?

You know what statistics are right? They're Facts. There are very few stranger abductions, there are however a huge amount of children abused by adults they know. Are you never going to allow your children to be with an adult when you are not around? That includes your child's other parent, your parents, your brothers and sisters, your in-laws, teachers, play-group leaders, sports coaches and your friends or their friend's parents.

A huge amount of children nowadays have a frighteningly restricted childhood, taught to be afraid of things that aren't a big threat instead of being able to do normal things. What would you say to your children if they insisted that they wanted to live in an underground bunker for fear of being hit by a meteor or an aeroplane? That is no more ridiculous than unnessecary car journeys to protect them from the minisicule risk of bad strangers.

I see most of the kids on my street, who aren't allowed to even go to the park which is just around the corner from us. They are bored, whiny and ironically a peadophiles wet dream as all they ever do is want to come into my house (or other neighbours) because they have nothing of interest to do as they are denied normal childhood activities like going to the park or exploring their neighbourhood. Two of the eleven year olds didn't even know that we are only 10 minutes walk from a river. Instead they play football on the street day in day out, which despite being a quite residential street does have some idiot tearing up it 10 times a day.

You can't wrap your kids in cotton wool, and no matter how careful you are bad **** can still happen. But I hope I would never sacrifice my child's childhood and independance in order to protect them from a tiny risk. When I was a kid I was always off looking for caves and tunnels (in the middle of the city, too much Enid Blyton:o we did sort of find some though) or building secret dens. Going on picnics, walking to the library with my friend and our younger brothers and playing following in the lifts overlooking the water feature. Finding longer ways to walk to school and insisting they were short cuts.:rolleyes: Kids need space to grow, independantly of their parents, it's how they learn to be adults.

The only thing in the world that has added to the danger children are in over the last 20 years is the amount of cars on the road.

jonski

Do you have children ?

Poxyshamrock

Hey, just as a matter of interest does anyone know if that link road at Grove Island is open yet or anywhere near completion?

iguana

jonski wrote:

Do you have children?

Not just yet and I won't have them if I can't afford to be a stay at home mother. I do work for Barnardos though.

jonski

iguana wrote:

Not just yet and I won't have them if I can't afford to be a stay at home mother.

This is something that we decided to do aswell , and sacrificed alot to do it , we couldn't afford it then and still can't now , so we went without a lot to run with it . And we will probably never know if it actually made a difference to the kids , but it make a difference to us .

As for our ideals and opinions , well , tbh , a lot of them have gone out the window over the years . We were very much part of the biker/hippy culture , green and planet aware . Now it's more about the struggle against the celtic tiger and keeping our head above water .

As for wrapping our kids in cotton wool , guilty as charged , they are reaching their teens now and we are letting go as much as possible . It's a mindset you get stuck into when your kids become the most important thing to you and one thats very hard to shake .

As for driving them to school , thats something I won't apologise for , they live in an area and went to a school where we were not comfortable letting them walk to and from .

dv

I doubt very many children are involved in serious accidents going to and from school. Cars can't go that fast in a traffic jam.

iguana

jonski wrote:

This is something that we decided to do aswell , and sacrificed alot to do it , we couldn't afford it then and still can't now , so we went without a lot to run with it . And we will probably never know if it actually made a difference to the kids , but it make a difference to us.

I think it probably makes a huge difference to them, not that they'd admit it while they're in their teens.:rolleyes: But I know that having my mum around whenever I needed her made more of a difference to me than the fact that a huge amount of my clothing were hand-me-downs from relatives or still having a crappy commodore 64 when everyone else had a mega-drive.

jonski wrote:

As for driving them to school , thats something I won't apologise for , they live in an area and went to a school where we were not comfortable letting them walk to and from.

Fair enough, it's just that the "stranger danger" thing really gets to me as it's so rare but it's something that we seem to focus on. Possibly because the reality is that if our kids are in any actual danger it's the people that we have to trust in order to get on with or lives, such as teachers, or the people that we trust because we love them, are the people who they might actually be in danger of.

jonski wrote:

As for our ideals and opinions , well , tbh , a lot of them have gone out the window over the years . We were very much part of the biker/hippy culture , green and planet aware . Now it's more about the struggle against the celtic tiger and keeping our head above water .

So what do you think the odds are that my homeschooling plans will ever make it to reality?:D

jonski

iguana wrote:

Fair enough, it's just that the "stranger danger" thing really gets to me as it's so rare but it's something that we seem to focus on. Possibly because the reality is that if our kids are in any actual danger it's the people that we have to trust in order to get on with or lives, such as teachers, or the people that we trust because we love them, are the people who they might actually be in danger of.

But as I said it is a mindset . Last year there were atleast two reports of " a white van " cruising , my rational mind says , urban myth , my emotional mind says " I'm driving them " . When I collected my youngest girl there a few weeks before the xmas break , she had a story about one of the young lads in her class running away from two people in a van that morning .

iguana wrote:

So what do you think the odds are that my homeschooling plans will ever make it to reality?:D

I think it's perfectly possible and probably even better for the child . I don't think the current school system teaches the kids properly and I try to influence my kids as much as I can with my own brand of "experience" . To this day I can't understand how they can spend the entire school day teaching them a subject while at no stage teaching them how to actually learn .

scrattletrap

Poxyshamrock wrote:

Hey, just as a matter of interest does anyone know if that link road at Grove Island is open yet or anywhere near completion?

The signs say May 2007 so in Irish terms thats August.

Karmafaerie

iguana wrote:

But I know that having my mum around whenever I needed her made more of a difference to me than the fact that a huge amount of my clothing were hand-me-downs from relatives or still having a crappy commodore 64 when everyone else had a mega-drive.

We got a Master System eventually, which wasn't the same but at least it was something!:D

iguana

Karmafaerie wrote:

We got a Master System eventually, which wasn't the same but at least it was something!:D

It was a Masters System II. I think Playstations were around by then though.

Poxyshamrock

scrattletrap wrote:

The signs say May 2007 so in Irish terms thats August.

yeah and probably August 2008 at that

wingnut

iguana wrote:

still having a crappy commodore 64 when everyone else had a mega-drive.

You could do so much more with the C64 than the MegaDrive.

poxyshamrock wrote:

yeah and probably August 2008 at that.

We were promised that the link road would be finished before Harry's Ma(ll) would be closed what a joke! Jan O'Sullivan and the likes have given us completion dates for the last few years.. all lies (blamed on contractors pulling out blah blah).

Its not going to have a major impact there as a lot of the traffic go out through park (coming out at the parkway) anyway and aviod that road. Things that would actually help:

1. A feckin' roundabout at St. Mary's Church! Why not? there is plenty of room I cannot understand why they didn't put a roundabout there. You can be sitting there for ages at certain times watching one or two cars dribble by the other direction.

2. My sister goes to UL like a few out that site. Its crazy she can drive to the Clare site of the campus but not get in to park. There should be a barrier system where people ont he Clare side with valid current ID cards can get into UL. She could park and walk but it is very isolated there, I dropped her out there once there very dodgy characters hanging around. Instead she has to go through the parkway to get there... madness!

ninty9er

wingnut wrote:

You could do so much more with the C64 than the MegaDrive.

We were promised that the link road would be finished before Harry's Ma(ll) would be closed what a joke! Jan O'Sullivan and the likes have given us completion dates for the last few years.. all lies (blamed on contractors pulling out blah blah).

Its not going to have a major impact there as a lot of the traffic go out through park (coming out at the parkway) anyway and aviod that road. Things that would actually help:

1. A feckin' roundabout at St. Mary's Church! Why not? there is plenty of room I cannot understand why they didn't put a roundabout there. You can be sitting there for ages at certain times watching one or two cars dribble by the other direction.

2. My sister goes to UL like a few out that site. Its crazy she can drive to the Clare site of the campus but not get in to park. There should be a barrier system where people ont he Clare side with valid current ID cards can get into UL. She could park and walk but it is very isolated there, I dropped her out there once there very dodgy characters hanging around. Instead she has to go through the parkway to get there... madness!

I can see both side of the open the north entrance to UL, but in fairness; all probability points to people using it as a rat run to avoid traffic by going to O'Briensbridge and then onto Castelconnell, Newport and the like

wingnut

Yes but they could use the vaid current student ID cards for barrier entry. If you had proof of address that you lived that sideyour card could be validated for entry each academic year.

Another solution would have been to have a car park on that side, one where you could drive into the Uni and park but not drive through it. That would have been very doable.