How not to drive your kid to school...

I noticed an interesting posting on Stef Lewandowski site about the need to reduce Co2 and his thoughts on the scourge of the 4x4. It reminded me of something - a little story of seriously selfish car usage.

A few months ago when walking my daughter to school (in the same leafy streets of Moseley/kingsheath that he mentions) I noticed a really odd scenario. It took me a few days of witnessing bits of the scenario to figure out what was happening. And then one morning as we reached the exit of the cul-de-sac where we live a large SUV blocked the end of the road. At the same time a very little girl (must have been about 5 yrs old as was smaller than my then smallish 6 yr old) crossed the road on a scooter (a child's scooter), once she had crossed the vehicle moved on, very slowly, and then I realised. The car housed the parent. The parent was kerb crawling their child to school!!

This to me was wrong on so many levels.

-The pure selfishness, blocking the road and then continuing to drive at 5mph in order to accompany a child
-The lesson this offered the child i.e. this as an acceptable way to be accompanied to school - god knows if we all went this way
-The general safety of the child and others on the road
-And really - is it necessary ever to drive such a big vehicle on such tiny back streets of Birmingham in such an uneconomical way?

Anyway I for one would welcome a reduction of vehicles on the road (see Stef's posting), it would make the buses more usable and the prospect of cycling safer. But there are other issues that need addressing. Employers need to be more flexible about home working. Also more flexible about start times, possibly rewarding cyclists/public transport users in someway.

The thing that's weird is that there is still some kudos in driving and in driving such obviously fuel gussling and damaging vehicles.

Nesta big idea thing

Yesterday I went to the West Midlands launch of the NESTA Big Green Challenge prize - a prize of £1million for the most innovative idea and implementation to reduce carbon emissions by a community. I have a whole bunch of thoughts on this and will blog about it later on this weekend (I have my daughters 7th birthday party to get through and a night out at Project X this eve). However although I feel the prize idea is in some ways flawed in relation to the scale of the problem the event itself provided some good networking opportunities. I was pleased to see that there are some significant movements within my own neighbourhood (Moseley, Birmingham) to try to reduce CO2 and I will be looking into this at more depth and spreading the word about how to get involved.

Incidentally, based on my previous post I have only used my car two days this week (not much I know but a start).