calnetalk.com

Geddi · Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 5:19 pm Post subject:

Clunk - (great name)

You ask me what's wrong with using a 4x4 for a school run? I'd normally use words of one or two syllables, except I know from the way you write that you aint all stupid.

It was part of a survey (FoE I think) some years ago which discovered that over half of all parents who drove their kids to school did so because they were: "worried about the amount of traffic on the roads which endangered their kids."

What they also discovered was that the parents taking their kids to school by car made up about 60% of all traffic on the roads in the vicinity of the schools surveyed! Quite something really. A solution to a problem which is caused by the solution. I am certain there is a name for this phenomena, I just can't think of it.

Besides this, hasn't your friend heard of air quality? Climate change? CO2 footprint? Your friend has kids so I am guessing your friend would want the best for their future. With all the implications in mind about what burning fossil fuels does to both local air quality and the wider implications (even GW Bush has accepted that human CO2 emmissions are causing increased global temperatures with profound consequences), isn't this question just a tad silly?

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Democracy is dead.

Clunk · Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 5:30 pm Post subject:

Geddi · Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 7:02 pm Post subject:

Fair answer Clunk, perhaps.. but can you please help me to understand why the need to drive to school at all?

Calne is a small town with no place very far from anywhere else within the town boundary. Walking to school is very good for kids, in all but the most inclement weathers it is good for the immune systems of the kids, it wakes them up a lot more than simply strolling into a parked car from home then from the car to the school.

(P.S. this is not a personal attack as all my kids were also driven to school, sometimes when school was literally a few dozen metres from their home, but this was not my own choice.)
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Democracy is dead.

Clunk · Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 7:18 pm Post subject:

Geddi · Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 7:26 pm Post subject:

OK thanks for that. My kids went to school out of town as well. I was not happy with that and let their mum know I was not. Not forever, but I did. It cost her ... blah blah, and I would remind her of her choice. She did, as a kind of excuse, work in the village for about 10 years so was going there anyway, but in this case, the chicken came first, so to speak so she worked where the kids attended school.

You know when I smoked I could find a million excuses for me to smoke. Whatever our personal habits, passtimes or whatever are unpopular with others, we always find 'reasons' or excuses for us doing them.

I trip myself up for doing the same even now and I kick myself up the backside and remind myself that ALL evils, as well as pleasures, have excuses behind them.
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Democracy is dead.