Greens call for action on school transport

BACK-TO-SCHOOL traffic shows “urgent action” is needed to rebuild public transport, the Green Party has said.

The party called for the Department of Transport to integrate the State rural transport system with rural school transport.

“That would help set up the bones of a proper rural public transport system,” said Green Party spokesman Alan Douglas.

The “predictable” return to school gridlock shows the system is dysfunctional, he added.

A generation was seeing the world “from the back of a car”, he said. Everyone “gets caught in the morning school run”. The situation was “just as bad” in urban areas. The party described a cut in the department’s budget for cycling and bus improvement measures as short-sighted.

In July the department increased its subvention to CIÉ by €36 million. The money came from the capital budget for cycling and bus improvement measures, rather than from the roads, said Mr Douglas. This is the “funding that would get our kids back making their own way to school, which would free up the road space for those who have to use their car”.

Some 125,000 children avail of the State-funded school bus service at a cost of about € 1,000 per student, a value-for-money report on school transport published by the Department of Education found last year.

The report showed the budget for school bus transport had increased by 245 per cent since 1997 but students taking the bus had fallen by one-fifth.