France: school parking

And why the airport travel? Because the West of England Partnership have recognised that the contributors to this blog are doing more to improve travel in the area than their previous set of consultants, so are funding our trips to different parts of the world. This week, a look at how the south of france deals with their traffic problems.

Look at this. Its a school, with the same car-on-pavement problems as all of Bristol's schools, but fixed.

A set of bollards away from the kerb effectively stop any parents, even if they own 4X4s and are really important, from using the pavement parking area. And you can't park in front of the bollards as that would block the road entirely, which is generally considered bad form.


This is clearly wrong, as it denies these important people the right to park their cars next to the school, so forcing them to park further away and walk, costing the parents 10 minutes, twice a day. With 110 schools in the city (i.e. ignoring nursery and private schools), and room for four cars in front of each, that's 410 cars/day parking in directly front of Bristol schools, a total of 8200 minutes. Which, under the revised NATA road costing rules, means that allowing parents with cars to park directly in front of the school, saves Bristol's drivers lots of money.

No, Bristol should not use such low-cost techniques to stop parking in front of schools, when we can show that such parking saves the city's parents so much money.