Survey Of Pupil Travel To Reduce Car Journeys

A HUGE survey is to be carried out to gauge school travel habits and encourage less car journeys.
Schools across Oxfordshire are to take part in the survey to find out how their pupils travel to school ?and hopefully encourage them to join the growing numbers who are walking or cycling.

Oxfordshire County Council?s Travel Plans Development Team is conducting its annual survey of journeys to school during September. Last year, more than 100 schools and 22,000 pupils took part.

The team sets up School Travel Plans with schools and they are proven to increase the number of pupils walking and cycling to school, and to reduce car usage and traffic congestion.

In Oxfordshire, School Travel Plans have changed about one in five car journeys to school in to walking, cycling or bus journeys

The Big Oxfordshire School Travel Survey will run from Monday, September 18 until Friday, September 29.

All mainstream schools, maintained or independent, are encouraged to take part and will receive a survey pack to help them join in. Taking part is an essential first step in developing a School Travel Plan.

Cllr David Robertson, Oxfordshire County Council?s cabinet member for transport, said: ?We?ve all recently experienced the difference to congestion levels that the return of pupils from school holidays makes to our roads.
?School Travel Plans work ? we now need to spread them even further than we already have. By taking part in this survey I hope that the imagination of other schools will be captured and that they will join the 134 schools in the county already signed up to these plans.?