Road Sense Programme

Tuesday 18 May 2004

I rather think that the Road Sense programme is a really good idea. Like most really good ideas it seems so obvious that you wonder why nobody thought of it before.

It just seems very logical to work road safety into the school programme every week rather than make it a one-off event from time to time. It might work out as simply as counting passing cars for five minutes for a maths lesson.

The end result will still be that kids and teachers all get to think actively about road safety as part of daily life. Which is how it should be.

I've been talking a lot lately about how Christchurch is growing as a city. We are going through a time of economic growth, population growth, social growth and most obviously on our roads, traffic growth. We are light years away from Auckland's problems and in fact compared with most other major cities we get off fairly lightly. But we are still much, much busier on our roads than any of us can ever remember before.

Next to the explosion of new home building all around Christchurch, the biggest sign of growth we see is the increasing density of traffic on our streets. It makes grown ups get grumpy at times.

I strongly suspect that if we got down and looked at it through a child's eyes what we would see is a fairly scary lot of roads. It seems incredible to think that within relatively recent memory most young people could either walk or bike to school. For far too many children now that is no longer an option.

It is not a problem that belongs on its own. A huge part of the traffic congestion on our city streets at certain times of the day comes from the mums and dads taking their children to school.

Up in Auckland where awful roads are a reality, they found that at times about 40 per cent of the total traffic was made up of parents on the school run. It is a major problem that we all need to look hard at finding ways around. In fact in the next few weeks the Council will be actively encouraging drivers around schools to up their game in terms of manners and safety.

In week one we will be rewarding good behaviour. Considerate parkers can aspire to some recognition of their efforts. That will be the carrot phase.

Week two will be the stick phase. Bad parkers, the leading lights of the "me first" school of parking, can expect to find negative recognition of their bad behaviour. A ticket, in fact.

On week three we will be mixing up the carrot and the stick recipe.

We are intent of stopping the chaos at far too many of our school gates. It is dangerous and all too often a display of very bad manners. Rather like my dear old Mum, I am beginning to see the point of good manners more as I get older.

Don't feel too picked upon, we are also running the same programme across town at Wainoni Primary. If we see some good results we will then extend the programme out to other schools. We have to keep going on finding ways to increase road safety for our youngsters.