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Cars to be banned from roads near 11 Edinburgh primary schools in pilot scheme

“School Streets” initiative to be trialled from August next year – but will motorists buy into it?

Cars will be banned from roads around 11 primary schools in Edinburgh under a “School Streets” pilot scheme announced by the Scottish capital’s council – but one potential barrier identified to the success of the propsals is whether they will gain support from motorists and local residents.

The initiative, which will apply in the morning and afternoon when children arrive at or leave school, is aimed at making roads around their places of study safer as well as encouraging more children to travel there on foot or by bicycle.

A spokeswoman for City of Edinburgh Council, quoted by the Edinburgh Evening News, said: “The pilot schemes will prohibit traffic on streets outside or around school entrances at specific times of day.

“Doing this creates a safer, more pleasant environment that promotes travel to school by walking and cycling.

“Further benefits for the whole community around the school, including residents and businesses, would include reduced congestion and decreased levels of air and noise pollution.”

According to a report prepared for a meeting of the council’s transport and environment committee next Tuesday, the scheme will initially be trialled from August 2015 at six primary schools.

Those are Abbeyhill,  Colinton, Cramond, Duddingston, St John’s, and Sciennes, with five others – Bonaly, Buckstone, Clermiston, St Peter’s and Towerhill –participating in Phase Two of the trial from December next year.

They are among 31 primary and secondary schools that expressed an interest in participating in the scheme after the proposals were announced last January as part of the city’s Local Transport Strategy.

The council’s transport convener, Lesley Hinds, said: “We were delighted with the level of interest from schools right across Edinburgh, so we wanted to make sure we extended the pilot scheme to as many school communities as we could.”

The move follows a similar initiative at three primary schools in Haddington, East Lothian this year which saw motorists, other than those who were exempt such as holders of blue badges, fined £50 for those ignoring the law.

The council’s plans were welcomed by Eileen Prior, executive director of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, who said: “Safety around schools is a major issue and many parents look to their local authority to take decisive action to help keep their children safe.

“We hope parents in Edinburgh will think through and make their feelings known about these proposals,” she added.

The report to the committee highlights potential barriers to the success of the scheme as being a “lack of enforcement, insufficient local community support to progress schemes, leading to requirement for repayment of upfront capital costs from revenue budget, non-compliance by motorists and no change in parental behaviour.”

If approved next week, there will be two rounds of consultations on the proposals, opening for the Phase One schools next month, and for those involved in Phase two in January next year, with a report on the outcome provisionally due to be submitted to the committee in March.

Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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23 comments

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chrismayoh | 9 years ago
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A local school used to have a sign which read "What part of SCHOOL KEEP CLEAR don't you understand?" That seemed to be on the right level . . . . .

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Paul_C | 9 years ago
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slap in double yellow lines with no waiting and no loading/unloading restrictions for 200 yards either side of a school entrance/gate and also make the 1 mile around the school residents parking ONLY. And enforce them...

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ded | 9 years ago
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racyrich wrote:

Funny how warm and fluffy fascist solutions can be made to sound.
Of course cars shouldn't be banned from near schools. Why should people going about their everyday business be banned because of a subset of inconsiderate parents. Why is the default response to a minority causing a problem always to stop everyone?

Cramond - entrance from cul-de-sac, Duddingston - same, Colinton - top of a hill leading to dead-end road, Sciennes - minor residential street with major road 200m to the north. So inconsiderate parents will be hardest hit and are the biggest problem. Them and rat-running scumbags. Fascist? I think not - a realistic idea that has the potential to (a) improve road safety for the most vulnerable users and (b) make people think how ******* lazy they are...

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OldRidgeback | 9 years ago
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There are plenty of roads a short distance away from Cramond primary where parents can park their Q7s and then walk to the school, which is what I expect will happen. The same goes for Clerry, though the cars won't be Q7s.

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racyrich | 9 years ago
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Funny how warm and fluffy fascist solutions can be made to sound.
Of course cars shouldn't be banned from near schools. Why should people going about their everyday business be banned because of a subset of inconsiderate parents. Why is the default response to a minority causing a problem always to stop everyone?
The correct solution is to blockade all cars carrying a child wearing the uniform of that school.

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brooksby replied to racyrich | 9 years ago
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racyrich wrote:

Funny how warm and fluffy fascist solutions can be made to sound.

He stops just short of invoking Godwin's law, swervings back into meaningful discourse at the last moment The crowd goes wild...

Quote:

Why is the default response to a minority causing a problem always to stop everyone?

But in the school I am using in my long winded anecdote, the people causing a problem are the majority.

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Edgeley | 9 years ago
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What a fantastic idea. Here in Oxford we have a primary school on the other side of a canal with no alternative entrance but a bridge which is blocked to all except pass holders at school "dropping off" and "picking up" times. And guess what - it has fantastic figures for kids cycling or walking to school.

Well done Edinburgh.

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brooksby | 9 years ago
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I live in a smallish village outside Bristol. Pretty much the entire village, the entire "catchment area" (is that still a thing?) for the primary school falls within a one kilometre radius circle of the school.

How do I know this, you ask? Because in the school's lobby there is an OS-type map of the village, with a circle drawn on it for a one kilometre radius centred on the school. Coloured dots mark where children at the school live, and how they "usually" get to school. Green dots marked "arrived by car", blue dots "walked", etc. Apparently this was done a couple of years ago. Basically, the village is a sea of green dots. The school is on a long straight road, ostensibly two lanes, with houses on one side and houses, then the school, then more houses, on the other.

My wife always walks our children to school (takes 5-10 minutes, depending on how distracted the kids are). Very, very few other people do.

People arrive early for school, to get "good" parking spaces nearby. Then their kids walk the few metres to get into the school grounds. People will park a bit further away and then parent and child will get out and walk down to the school, to look less as if they just drove there. Picking-up and dropping-off times are awful - horns hooting, people waving at each other, shouting.

A couple of years ago a boy was knocked down outside the school - ran out between two parked cars and got hit by a car being driven down there at about 10mph (you can't drive any faster than that along there when it's picking-up/dropping-off time, as the road becomes a narrow single lane between all the parked cars). Child got a broken leg. Driver was distraught.

The school finally got in touch with the council and the police, and a new "designated crossing point" was put in, with a road narrowing exercise.

It didn't make much of a difference, and things are back to normal. The school sent a letter home to all parents, most of whom jutt ignored it completely.

The Edinburgh exercise looks interesting - in my opinion, at my children's school they need to close the entire road outside the school to motor traffic during certain times. Just that one road, and only to anyone who isn't a resident actually living on that road or (perhaps) a taxi or something like that. Because there is no reason at all that children and parents cannot walk (or cycle, it could happen!) to school from one kilometre away.

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outersquid replied to brooksby | 9 years ago
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As an ex-resident of a village just outside Bristol (Long Ashton in my case), I can say that trying to restrict parents' parking near schools is futile: when the primary round the corner from us tried, there was nigh on armed rebellion, coupled with an increase in the number of people stopping in the close below our house, a couple of streets from the school.

Interestingly, here in urban Hull, lots of children do walk to the local primary; this may just be down to relative poverty and a lower proportion of 4x4 ownership.

I wish Embra well, but hold little hope for success…

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LarryDavidJr | 9 years ago
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Make it mandatory everywhere.

We live < 0.5 mile from our childs school, you wouldn't believe the amount of people we walk past (already almost halfway there) who we see getting into a car and then see them at the school gate a minute or two later dropping their kids off.

And no, they aren't on their way somewhere else. On the way back the car is already back in the parking space.

Though I should probably add, this will likely just move the problem a bit further down the road, making that part of the school journey dangerous rather than right outside the school.

The real answer of course is getting people to stop such frivolous use of their car. Getting them to actually think about consideration for other people is probably a step too far though, lets not overstretch the targets.

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Some Fella | 9 years ago
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Yes times a million

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mmag1 | 9 years ago
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My local primary school looks like a drive through McDonald's at 8:50 every morning. If they could drive into their child's classroom, most parents would.

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pmanc | 9 years ago
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Brilliant. Well done Edinburgh for having the balls to try it.

I guess indicators of success will be popularity (in the mid to long term) and child safety stats. And as to whether it will work? Well there's only one way to find out isn't there.

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ike2112 | 9 years ago
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Of the 4 primary schools nearest my home, 2 are on the main road through the town, and the other 2 are on a road through the neighbouring town which leads to the train station.
A fair bit of the city commuter population of this area drive past those 4 schools, and its pretty much unavoidable.

Personally I find, whether I'm cycling or driving, that its the schoolparents themselves who are clearly distracted drivers; not noticing speedbumps until it's too late, suddenly stopping without indication, pulling away as soon as the kid is gone without checking mirrors, etc.

I was fortunate/unfortunate enough to be on one of those driver awareness courses a few years ago, and found it interesting that an experiment speed check outside a school in Gloucester found over 80% of people passing the end of a road with a school on it, were over the speed limit. They did a cross-check and the majority were users of the school - either teachers or parents of the kids they were potentially 'endangering'.

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marcswales | 9 years ago
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"other than those who were exempt such as holders of blue badges,"

There we go, broken already!

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Batdan | 9 years ago
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Hold on a minute, what if a load of crazy sharp toothed baboons escape from Edinburgh Zoo and start roaming the streets adjacent to some of these schools. Are we suggesting that parents should abandon their kids to the chances of probable non-hominid primate predation, are we? Madness.

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jaxf | 9 years ago
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What a great idea. I live in Edinburgh, and have a primary school about 3 minutes walk away, so imagine this will really inconvenience me. I still think it is a fantastic thing to do, and wholeheartedly support it.

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jaxf | 9 years ago
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What a great idea. I live in Edinburgh, and have a primary school about 3 minutes walk away, so imagine this will really inconvenience me. I still think it is a fantastic thing to do, and wholeheartedly support it.

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rich22222 | 9 years ago
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About time somebody took the initiative

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Das | 9 years ago
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LoL. Drivers in Embra Drive in the Bus Lanes when their not supposed to, and Don't when they can, the chance of this working is very slim. TBH it may stop people from driving their kids the 1/3 of a mile to school, then abandoning their cars on pavements and where ever takes their fancy.

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johndonnelly | 9 years ago
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Yes. Yes. Banning other motorists from the road is clearly a good idea. They're all incredibly dangerous. Frankly they're slow. And they get in my way.

It will still be OK for me to drop off the kiddies in my Q7. Won't it? After all the roads are really dangerous and I love them so much I just have to wrap them up in a tank. I'm not really a motorist as such, just someone trying to get from A to B.

End Sarcasm.

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GrahamSt | 9 years ago
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If they can enforce this then it sounds like a great initiative.

IF!

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paulrbarnard | 9 years ago
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Totally agree with this. All schools should have a ¼ mile exclusion zone around them at school start and stop times.

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