Traffic has been wonderful these days – because schools are closed. Couldn’t we have traffic like this all the time?
As a visual, here is traffic when schools are closed:
And here’s traffic on a typical day:
Those red and orange marks are sadness and despair.
How To Have This All The Time
It’s pretty simple. School buses. Right now parents (or more often drivers) pick their kids up in private vehicles. So they drive, park on the sidewalk, and then take home creatures that actually occupy very little space. It’s a mess.
Right now they park buses in front of Visakha (near where I have lunch) but I never see kids in them. And people do take school vans, but they’re hot and dodgy and best avoided.
What I’m suggesting is nice buses – like the ones we put tourists in – that take students to bus stops in various hoods (Nugegoda, Battaramulla, whatever). Like packet switching basically. You take batches of kids out of the schools and drop them off nearer their homes, where parents can pick them up, or they can just get a PickMe or whatever. Kids can get picked up to school at the same locations.
We have got to move away from private vehicles for as much stuff as possible. The best place to start is with schools.
Alternately, send more people to Hogwart’s.
Sigh. I have been thinking of this for a while. A car per individual sometimes. Perhaps all kids can be taken by a school bus to a nearby park and dropped off there where parents are waiting for them
??
We also need to address the problem of overcrowding in schools. Colombo schools seem to be catering to students not just from the vicinity but from across half the country.
Many popular schools in Colombo attract pupils from far outstation, I used to see school vans with boards indicating that they travel from Hikkaduwa. (This is from before we had a highway).
The ambition of all parents seems to be to send their children to big Colombo schools.
What we need are satellite schools, set up by the big schools in rural areas to cater to rural students. Bussing students for miles is such a waste of resources, traffic is just one of the by-products.