Moving the School Peak

A senior businessman, the company secretary of engineering mega-giant Guest, Keen & Nettlefold no less, not only admitted yesterday that we can’t just build our way out of urban traffic congestion, he stated that moving school hours would help.

That’s something bus company managers have been saying for, what, 30 years. Change the school run and you spread peak loads on the roads. What the GKN director was proposing was a switch from a 0900 to a 1000 start, after the end of the peak period.

His heart’s in the right place, though a 1000 start would mean a 1545-1630 finish, at the threshold of the evening peak, when currently there is generally an hour’s separation between school and work. It would mean pupils getting home in winter well after dark. It also means more teaching takes place in the afternoon, when pupils tend to respond less and disrupt more. Mind you, it would solve the problem of teenagers struggling to get out of bed each morning.

What operators have long put forward is a *staggering* of school hours. By clustering schools and rationally devising hours among them (some on earlier continental, others on current hours), you could effectively halve the school bus fleet by enabling one vehicle to undertake four runs per day, rather than just one in the morning and one in the afternoon. And you can spread other traffic across a wider time band, thereby reducing disruptive peaks for all.

It’s transport professionals in the States that dictate school hours, not individual governoring bodies as in England. With more than 20 per cent of peak time traffic attributable to the school run, with pressure on more environmentally sensible commuting, with calls to reduce school gate congestion (thereby improving local road safety), isn’t it time the government took control of school hours, for the good of all? It’s possible that some of the Pathfinder initiatives in the proposed education Bill could do just that.

Interesting comments from a business leader. Then he goes and says, "We cannot just build new roads. It takes 20 years for new road to be built; but moving school times could provide us with some breathing space in the interim."