Can schools bring better mobility?

ROAD congestion around schools is getting worse, affecting not only the school community and students’ families but also surrounding neighborhoods. In the cities of Mandaluyong and San Juan, there is the daily traffic ordeal along Ortigas Avenue, linked to the pickup and drop off of students at De La Salle Greenhills, Xavier School and Immaculate Conception Academy. In Muntinlupa, some roads are choked by vehicles getting in and out of San Beda College Alabang. In Quezon City, there is the continuing traffic nightmare along Katipunan Road. Congestion inside Ateneo’s Loyola Heights campus has gotten so bad that exiting the school in a car after dropping off a student can take 30 to 40 minutes. You can find similar examples in every major city in the Philippines.

With more vehicles stuck in traffic around schools, the persons most at risk are the students who are exposed to higher concentrations of particulate matter and other toxic emissions that can affect a child’s health and lead to serious illnesses. Students who walk or cycle to school are also exposed to the heat and noise from motor vehicles. And this is harmful exposure day in and day out while a child attends school.

The time has come to recognize that our current practice — where schools allow (or even encourage) every family to bring their kids to school in a private motor vehicle — is leading to our collective peril. The situation is not sustainable with children spending more and more of their day inside a motor vehicle stuck in traffic, with many parents under constant stress, managing the complexities and expenses of picking up and dropping off students, and with travel to school taking longer each passing month. And it will get much worse unless we recognize the problem, accept that we are part of the problem and adopt a different approach.

The key to a faster, safer, healthier, less costly and less stressful journey to school is to get as many families as possible to abandon the use of private motor vehicles to bring their kids to school and shift instead to walking, riding a bicycle or using shared transportation (e.g. school buses, school shuttles, vanpools) to get to school — with the exception of students with disabilities who may have no feasible alternative except to use a private motor vehicle. When everyone chooses more efficient and sustainable modes of transportation to get to school — instead of private motor vehicles — the entire community will be better off. Making this happen requires the different key stakeholders — parents, school administrators and local government officials — to work together from the onset to find the best ways to achieve the desired result — and then to introduce rules that will motivate everyone to change behavior for the common good.

For example, a good rule might be to bar private motor vehicles carrying fewer than 5 students from approaching within 200 meters of the school (with the exception of motor vehicles carrying persons with disability). To ensure road safety and avoid severe collisions, all roads approaching the school should have a maximum speed limit of 20 kilometers (km) per hour, as required by the national transportation and traffic code, plus traffic-calming infrastructure (e.g. speed humps, raised crossings, etc.) to get vehicles to slow down.

For those living within a 2-km radius from the school, a 30-minute (or less) walk to school becomes a viable option. To encourage more students to walk, local officials could improve the “walkability” of roads leading to the school. The emphasis would be on making sidewalks leading to the school wide, continuous and free of hazards, while motor vehicles on these roads travel at safe speeds. Shade trees could be planted along the way to keep the walking paths cool and attractive.

Roads leading to the schools could be upgraded to include protected bike lanes (with barriers to fully separate bicycles from motor vehicles). With a network of bike lanes leading to the school, it could be an easy 20-minute bicycle ride for students living even 5 km away from the school. Within the school, it would be important to have secure bicycle parking facilities for students, teachers and administrative staff. To encourage more students to bike to school, a regular “bike bus” could be organized — parents and students on bicycles meet up at a convenient assembly point, and then everyone bikes together to school (with parents or teachers who are experienced cyclists serving as bike ride marshals and escorts).

In parallel, every school should have a program to promote shared transportation — getting to school on a school bus, school shuttle or private van. If there were a rule whereby only high-capacity vehicles filled with students are able to enter a given perimeter and drop students off at the school’s entrance, there would be a strong incentive for families to sign up for shared transportation. At the moment, school buses and shuttles tend to be costly, and demand for their use has shrunk in recent decades. With school buses traveling long distances in heavy traffic, the last few students to be dropped off usually endure an excessively long ride.

But the economics of school transportation can change dramatically if nearly all students opt for riding a school shuttle or school bus. With more demand, a school shuttle or school bus could source all its passengers from the same village or barangay. This would mean that the school transport could operate almost on a point-to-point basis, considerably reducing its travel time as well as vehicle operating costs. There is also good potential for families in the same neighborhood to organize vanpools, sharing the running costs of using a high-capacity private vehicle.

Amid the difficulties of getting kids to school in big cities, the good news is that there are ready solutions that lead to a better mobility future for students and their parents. A “tragedy of the commons” can be avoided by instituting rules and practices to prevent a finite resource from being depleted by uncontrolled access. In this case, every school community has a responsibility to manage and control private vehicle access to the school, shaping travel behavior and choices so that everyone can get to school safely and efficiently, minimizing time sitting in traffic and students’ exposure to vehicle emissions, heat and noise. There is no other way.

Robert Y. Siy is a development economist, city and regional planner, and public transport advocate. He is the co-convenor of the Move As One Coalition. He can be reached at [email protected] or followed on Twitter @RobertRsiy.