Scooters are a lot easier to carry when kids decide they don’t want to ride any more mid-journey. Also cheaper, easier to store, fit in the car and you’re allowed to carry them on buses.
Only school that I’ve seen with a bike shed full of bikes is Whitehall Primary, which happens to be next to the Railway Path at Greenbank. Probably evidence there that most parents want segregated and safer routes before letting kids ride. Subjective safety is an important factor too. Statistics alone won’t convince people onto bikes if they still ‘feel’ unsafe.
I did read a survey once though saying that almost half of school kids want to cycle to school but don’t safe enough. The stats for teachers who would ride if they felt totally safe weren’t much lower either. The actual statistics in reality though are almost insignificantly low.
We’ve done it for 3 years, since E started school, albeit with the kids as passengers travelling with me. I honestly came very close to finally giving up before Christmas. We had 3 days with so many dodgy things happening to us on the roads I decided I didn’t want to have to go through the process of hyping myself into survival / defensive mode and go through the level of stress I was experiencing on a daily basis. That I felt that way and was thinking like that made the whole situation feel very depressing. Not helped by the state of shock I was likely in having experienced numerous close calls in such a short period of time with my children onboard. If I feel like that as a hardened lifelong cyclist then I can easily see how impossible it will be to shift things towards cycling to school for the average parent / child.
Would be interesting to see ‘walk to school’ too, although I’m sure it would be equally uninspiring
i think they key at the moment is ‘scoot to school’, judging by the bike sheds in schools.
Scooters are a lot easier to carry when kids decide they don’t want to ride any more mid-journey. Also cheaper, easier to store, fit in the car and you’re allowed to carry them on buses.
Only school that I’ve seen with a bike shed full of bikes is Whitehall Primary, which happens to be next to the Railway Path at Greenbank. Probably evidence there that most parents want segregated and safer routes before letting kids ride. Subjective safety is an important factor too. Statistics alone won’t convince people onto bikes if they still ‘feel’ unsafe.
I did read a survey once though saying that almost half of school kids want to cycle to school but don’t safe enough. The stats for teachers who would ride if they felt totally safe weren’t much lower either. The actual statistics in reality though are almost insignificantly low.
We’ve done it for 3 years, since E started school, albeit with the kids as passengers travelling with me. I honestly came very close to finally giving up before Christmas. We had 3 days with so many dodgy things happening to us on the roads I decided I didn’t want to have to go through the process of hyping myself into survival / defensive mode and go through the level of stress I was experiencing on a daily basis. That I felt that way and was thinking like that made the whole situation feel very depressing. Not helped by the state of shock I was likely in having experienced numerous close calls in such a short period of time with my children onboard. If I feel like that as a hardened lifelong cyclist then I can easily see how impossible it will be to shift things towards cycling to school for the average parent / child.