Our children are victims of road violence. We need to talk about the deadly norms of car use
Our children are victims of road violence. We need to talk about the deadly norms of car use
We accept the daily toll of road deaths and injuries as the price we pay to be able to drive everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
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"We could reduce the speed limits for cars to be closer to the average speeds of walking (6 kilometres per hour"
Geezus christ. I'm guessing the author has no idea what it's like to be a parent.
Here's a hint: kids need to go places. Public transport cannot get you to those places. Also, parents need to work (both of them) or else the kids don't eat. As a parent I'm flat out busy from sunrise to midnight, and they want me to take the 1 hour I spend commuting each day and expand it to five hours. That doesn't work:
- get the three year old ready for school (this can be ten minutes or an hour, so you better start getting ready an hour before you need to leave)
- walk to the bus stop (five minutes for me, but with a two year old... twenty minutes, not necessarily walking but you need to allow for that much time which means you'll spend a lot of it waiting at the bus stop)
- bus to daycare, 20 minutes as it winds through the suburbs
- drop the kid off at daycare, then wait for the next bus (30 minutes later)
- bus out of the suburbs onto the main bus line (another 20 minutes meandering through suburbs)
- finally, on the main bus line to the CBD (20 minutes)
- then 15 minutes waiting for a bus out of the CBD towards where I work
- then 15 minutes on that bus
Unfortunately... you can't get a 3 year old to eat breakfast at 5am and the childcare centre won't let you drop them off at 6am either. So that schedule means starting at work at around 10:30am. Ouch.
And in order to get home in time for the kid two have dinner without throwing a tantrum... I'd probably need to leave work at 2pm.
Sorry but it's just not possible to work 3 hours a day and pay a mortgage/put food on the table/etc.
Would you support public transport improvements?
Of course I'd support better public transport.
But I'm not really sure what form that would take? The bus from my house to the childcare centre obviously drops us off there when the bus is scheduled to do so, which means I will always face the longest possible wait for the next bus to come by. It only takes two minutes to drop the kid off... but the bus driver isn't going to wait.
And it's pretty normal for public transport to not go to where you're going unless you're going to or from the CBD. That means changing busses.
I could live in the CBD... then transit infrastructure would be great - but the realestate there is way out of my reach, price wise.
how we can upgrade PT:
- higher bus frequency
- bus route reform (some current routes really suck)
- more bus lanes on congested routes
- more bike infrastructure so you don't have to ride a bus/car/train to get anywhere
Your list of barriers to not using a car are all a result of poor urban planning which is rife in the majority of our cities. If we had stopped the sprawl 30 years ago then car dependence could have been mitigated.
Guess I'm one of the lucky ones in that I can walk kids to school and daycare (less than 1km) then cycle to work easily (less than 10km).
Guess I’m one of the lucky ones in that I can walk kids to school and daycare (less than 1km) then cycle to work easily (less than 10km).
Yeah our local daycare centre isn't well run and unfortunately, so we had to go to the next suburb over. My partner and I don't work close to each other so... we live about half way between our two jobs. Can't really get any closer unless one of us switches careers. When I do have time to ride the bicycle to work (try to do it once a week) it's 70 minutes. Normally I take the motorbike.