Sustainable School Travel, Controlling Distance and Safety.

In The Netherlands the standards for minimum school size have been increased several times in recent decades, for reasons of economy. In doing so population density was taken into account as a proxy for accessibility. The physical process of concentration is going on, because of a number of factors: institutional school amalgamations from the nineties leading to relocation into 'uni-locations'; the habit in design for new town quarters to group primary schools of different religious orientations into a physical cluster, called 'school islands', creating pupil concentrations of over 1.000 pupils, five times the mean national school size; and the the addition of education related activities (like psycho-social care) in 'broad schools', stimulating the creation of school-islands in existing town quarters. Of course physical concentration leads to growing travel distances, which stimulate car use, partly because of traffic safety, worsening it at the same time. At present 38% of accidents in which pupils are involved are happening on the trip to or from school. Elements affecting school travel, regarding both distance and travel mode, include choice of school, religious preferences and the use of cars driven by parents on their way to work. Organised school transport, strong only amongst the orthodox protestant, is discouraged by an increase of the minimum distance to 6km each way. Schools and local government are not unaware of the problems, including the impact on the growing obesity problem. Yet initiatives to counteract are relatively weak. These include: stimulating walking to school, by making pedestrian itineraries safer and enhance 'walking school buses', stimulating biking, for instance on the route from school to (after school) sporting; and trying to control the traffic chaos by introducing 'kiss-and-ride' facilities. Initiatives to stop the exodus from schools with higher ethnic minorities are developing but these are difficult to make effective. For the covering abstract please see ITRD E135207.