A Dublin Transport Office (DTO) survey, published last week, revealed four in 10 children who are driven to school in Dublin live within 2km of the school. Eoin Burke-Kennedyfinds out why.
The survey found about 125,000 pupils and students are being driven to school and college each day in the greater Dublin area.
The suggestion is that overly car-reliant parents and under-exercised children are needlessly clogging up the city's roads, adding to congestion and causing longer commute times.
But just how true is this?
The National Parents' Council (NPC) says many parents drive their children, the younger ones at least, for safety and security reasons.
The council claims it has received numerous calls from parents who insist they are forced to drive because the city's roads are simply too dangerous to let children traverse alone.
The lack of safe crossing points in built-up areas is a frequent complaint, the NPC says.
The other side of the coin is that most working parents are under too much time pressure in the mornings to walk the children themselves and are prevented from dropping the children early because of inadequate pre-school supervision.
Although some workplaces offer more flexible start times, this is the exception rather than the norm.
NPC spokesman Philip Mudge says society has moved to a place where nobody walks anywhere.
"How many people carry their groceries home from the shop? he asks.
"Is it reasonable to ask a small child to carry a heavy bag for a mile and a half when most adults won't?
"Asking parents to make children do something that the rest of society is not prepared to do is unfair," he argues.
"If everybody walked everywhere then roads might be safer, crossings might be better marked and motorists might drive slower.
"But how many motorists nowadays stop to let children cross the road?" he asks.
Mudge does not dispute the benefits of walking to school and supports the DTO's campaign to reduce car usage but questions why children should be made the "cutting-edge" of change.
The DTO's survey found the number of children travelling to school by car had increased 6 per cent since 2002, mirroring trends in other countries.
A recent US study found that less than 15 per cent of US students walked or cycled to school compared with more than 50 per cent 30 years ago.
The shift is undoubtedly part of a global car culture but may also be viewed in the context of an erosion in child autonomy across the industrialised world.
Experts argue children are too protected from the world because of parental fears not just of road accidents but of abduction and assault.
Research published in 2003 by Britain's National Children's Bureau found that 67 per cent of eight to 10-year-olds and 24 per cent of 11 to 15-year-olds had never been to the park or the shops on their own.
DTO director John Henry acknowledges the safety and security concerns of parents but he suggests there is a large number of secondary school students who are driven to school in the morning and who then walk home in the afternoon.
"That presumably is for convenience," he says, "and not a safety issue.
"Walking to school with your child can be a bonding time which is lost in the car."
Henry does not advocate a particular formula for individual families or schools but wants people to begin a process of thinking about how they can reduce their car use.
The DTO survey was conducted as part of its One Small Step campaign to reduce car usage in favour of walking or other forms of transport.
Henry says the DTO wants to initiate a culture of change similar to the success of recycling.
"If everyone left their car behind for at least one trip each week, that would be 200,000 fewer car trips every day in the greater Dublin area, less traffic and less pollution."
Henry cites the success of the walking school bus programmes, where parent volunteers lead groups of pupils to school each morning as a solution to the safety concerns.
Another school, he says, came up with a trolley convoy plan where the older children pushed the schoolbags in trolleys.
"A lot of the time we are stuck in traditional ways of doing things and we don't think outside the box," he says.
Fine Gael MEP Jim Higgins wants the Government to use data, held by the Department of Education, showing where pupils live and the route they take to school every day to tackle urban congestion.
He believes the information could then be used by local authorities to provide walkways, cycle tracks and bus routes aimed specifically at school children.
"To do this you would map the homes of the pupils; those areas with the greatest concentration of pupils in the vicinity should be provided with direct cycle tracks to the schools," he says.
"Pupils who travel greater distances should be provided with extra buses on these routes to cope with higher demand at school times, taking into account the opening and closing time of particular schools."
Higgins insists that if children and parents are to be encouraged to leave the car at home then facilities such as bike shelters, proper cycle tracks and better road safety education in schools must be provided.
