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Parents Stopping Parents

At a number of schools in Los Angeles, parents are being press-ganged into serving as traffic safety officials to help protect kids from … other parents, driving kids to school.

From January to November 2008, there were 153 traffic-related injuries around schools, which Los Angeles public school officials said was much higher than five years ago, though they could not provide data for prior years…

…Increased traffic around schools has vexed other major cities, too. Nationwide, roughly 21 percent of morning traffic is generated by parents driving children to school, said Raquel Rivas, a spokeswoman for Safe Routes to School, a national organization formed to encourage walking and bicycling to school.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Cars, Cities, Commuting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Parents Stopping Parents”

  1. Bill T Says:
    April 10th, 2009 at 2:17 pm

    Is that 21% by miles or by trip?

  2. Lee Hanna Says:
    April 10th, 2009 at 6:38 pm

    On my street, we have an elementary school at the “top” of a T-intersection. Early in the year, there are serious clogs as the parents park on both sides of the street, sometimes so close to the intersection that the buses cannot make the turn. Very few kids actually walk (mine do, but you can see the school from my windows). The school has to post teachers at the entrances to keep out parents and keep the bus lane free.

    The really annoying bit is that the school’s *back* entrance on another street, across an empty city park, is always totally empty, no one wants to park so far away.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

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