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Online car insurance specialist elephant.co.uk quizzed parents on the school run and discovered that 56% of children are now driven to school. However when asked how they got to school themselves 57% said they had walked. The amount of children using public transport has quartered since their parents' day with school bus usage more than halving over the same period.
So why has there been such a shift? elephant.co.uk asked why parents drive their children to school and 45% said it was due to distance, while 31% said it was because of convenience. However, this is contradicted by another result which shows that 68% live less than 2 miles from school.
elephant.co.uk managing director, Brian Martin, said, “It's odd that parents use distance as an excuse considering how many live relatively close to school and especially how many of them used to walk themselves.
“It makes sense for children to walk to school wherever possible as childhood obesity rates are rising in the UK with around 1 million children under the age of 16 classed as obese. Another interesting point to note is that just 14% drive their children due to safety from strangers.”
An unusual outcome from the results is that parents seem to be contradicting themselves as they are driving their children to school even though 87% of them believe that doing so contributes to traffic congestion problems. So by driving their children to school they're essentially causing themselves to sit in traffic that they appreciate they're creating.
The following table shows how today's children get to school compared to their parents:
Children |
Parents |
Driven |
56% |
Driven |
13% |
Walk |
34% |
Walk |
57% |
Brian Martin continued, “However, it is comforting to see from this table that there are still some children that walk to school.”
Issue date: 28/08/2007
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