ONE OF the few advantages to working right through August (and there aren’t many) is that the journey to work is such a delight. Despite the number of commuters taking to their cars for fear of being blown up on the Tube, I can now drive to the office in the morning in only two-thirds of the time it takes during the school term. Each time I whizz to Wapping, I wonder, “Why can’t it be like this all year round?”

Well, it could. What we need is a national system of yellow school buses. In America, the birthplace of the yellow bus, 54 per cent of schoolchildren travel to school that way. Here, just 6 per cent do. No wonder our roads are so clogged between 8am and 9am.

If school buses were to replace those fleets of 4x4s, each containing just one mother and a child or two, the roads would be clearer, pollution would be cut and a huge amount of time would be saved — both by parents and by those other drivers whose journeys are held up by the school run.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group for the Sutton Trust has calculated the annual cost of the current school run, and it is extortionate: two million more cars on the road at peak times, 2.1 million tons of CO2 emissions, 500 million litres of fuel by private cars, 6,000 minor injuries, 900 serious injuries, 40 deaths, 570 million lost hours for accompanying parents and 130 million lost hours for other commuters.

And it can only get worse. More and more children are being driven to school: 39 per cent of primary school pupils in 2001, up from 22 per cent in 1985. Even the proportion of secondary school pupils taken by car has nearly doubled, from 10 per cent to 18 per cent. The House of Commons Transport Select Committee estimates that school-run traffic accounts for one in five journeys at 8.50am.

This is mainly because of parents’ fears about safety — they don’t want their child abducted, mugged or run over. Fair enough. Even though the exercise may be healthier, walking and cycling are also far more dangerous than being driven. If your child isn’t robbed for his mobile phone, he may well be injured or killed by a car. In terms of deaths per kilometre travelled, cycling and walking are more than ten times riskier than travelling by car. But bus travel is safer still: accounting for less than a quarter of the deaths of car travel.

The Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge has recently been experimenting with a yellow bus service. Nearly two-thirds of the children who have signed up for it used to be driven to school by their parents. As more than 100 are registered to use the service, that means that the introduction of just one bus has replaced 25,000 car journeys each year.

There is an added advantage of yellow buses for children in the lower social groups. At the moment, they are much less likely than richer children to choose a school with better results that is further away from home, because of the difficulties of getting there. Families in the top fifth of incomes own, on average, nearly two cars and their children travel two and a half miles to school. Those in the bottom fifth own just over half a car per family and their children travel just over a mile to school.

Children with poor parents are far more likely to go to the nearest school, whatever its academic reputation. A decent school bus service would give them better opportunities.

Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust, has been lobbying the Government to bring in yellow buses. His study calculates that the extra cost (assuming that children who can afford it pay 50p per trip) is only £83m million a year. This would be hugely offset by the benefits: around £350 million a year to parents, in terms of lower driving costs and time saved, and £100 million to society in reduced traffic.

And that does not include the incalculable benefits of poor children being able to go to better schools, nor the reduction in truancy and youth crime that a bus scheme could bring. Having to jump on the yellow bus at the beginning and end of the school day means no time for hanging around and getting into trouble on the high street.

The trouble for the Government is that this is a thorny cross-departmental policy. Education has to work with Transport and Environment. But Tony Blair has been promising us joined-up government for years. Let’s see a bit of it now.

Beyond belief

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