Reimagining the school run for a sustainable future

At a Time of Climate Crisis: Electric schoolbuses could be a silver bullet for sustainable transport

MaREI researcher Dr Hannah Daly at ERI, University College Cork has written an article for the Irish Times on the topic of ‘Reimagining the school run for a sustainable future’. 

Until my children started going to school, I didn’t fully appreciate a key driver of transport’s growing climate impact. Dropping kids to school and activities is part of most parents’ daily grind. It is also one of the main factors behind the more than doubling of greenhouse gas emissions from Irish transport since 1990, far higher growth than any other sector.

The census has tracked how children get to school since 1986 and the trends are eyebrow-raising. Then, half of primary school students walked or cycled, and one in five took the bus.

Now, 60 per cent of primary students are driven to school, and even in Dublin city the figure is 36 per cent. Modern children are accurately called the “backseat generation”.

Read the full article here.