Here at IST nobody is carpooling. Why? Because we have to get up too early and we don't want to loose another 5 or 10 minutes of sleep to pick up other kids.
Many of the IST children are taken to school in a big 4x4 car (Landrover/Landcruiser etc.). These cars have a CO2 emission of 500gr per kilometer while a 40-50 seater bus has an emission of 800gr per kilometer. In many cases the children are dropped of at school and the parent drives back home, doubling the distance driven, making the bus mor economical than the car, even if it had only one passenger. If we manage to fill the bus with 40 kids that otherwise would have been alone in a car, we can reduce the carbon emission on the trip between secondary school and elementary school by 97.5%.
And it not only would save the environment, it would also save you money!
Does anyone out there realize the distance between the two campuses over the road is exactly 6 kilometers! (I've just measured it). And does anyone realize that the running cost of your 4x4 car is around $1 per kilometer.So if all the parents that have children in elementary school and live on the peninsula could just drop of their child at the Secondary school, they would save the roundtrip worth $12.
If we would hire a luxury Coach to take let's say 40 children from Secondary school to elementary school it would cost approx. $40 per trip, or $1 per child. This means the parent that drive a round trip would save $11.
With the new school times I would propose to have 2 buses to start with.
One bus would leave from let's say the BP station on Ocean road at 7:30 and one bus would leave elementary school at the same time, both to arrive well in time for the 8:00 start at Secondary School.
At 8:00 the same buses would leave from Secondary School to Elementary to be there well before 8:30
By shuttling approx. 80 children around in each direction we would reduce the number of car trips over the selendar bridge by at least 100 in each direction. That is a lot of cars!
3 comments:
My husband takes our 2 children to school everymorning (like many others I'm sure). With school starting at 8.00 it would mean that it is out of the question for dad to take the kids, so I have to make 2 trips to school instead of one and my husband is off to work anyway. Instead of 1 car 2 cars will leave our household in the morning then, not good for global warming. A schoolbus would be something to considder though, providing a few security issues are taken care off.
School buss humble idea but:
-late start would cause getting stuck in the traffic and no time saving/ fuel saving/ less emissions would be achieved.
-who would put the money in to invest in the bus?
- Who would DRIVE the bus? Safety is a big problem, and I would not like to have my kids be driven by someone I do not know and trust.
- who is going to control the kids? ( bullying etc)
- who takes responsibilty?
- cost saving at the end of the day?
- In addition, for busy working dads the school trip might be sometimes only time in a day to have just alone with kids. Those moments are appreciated by dads as well as children.
You could hire a coach from a professional company. IST does that all the time for the school trips. Never I've heard these issues raised when children go on school trips.
If dropping off the kids is the only time working dads can be alone with them it says a lot about how that family works. It doesn't. The dad should have his attention on the road, not with the kids. And you're worried about who's driving the bus??? Get real!!!!
If school starts a bit later, the children can go to bed a bit later. Then quality time can be spend with dad. He then doesn't need to divide his attention between the children and the road and with that endangering other road users.
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