From September 16 to 22, 20 cities from Romania are added to the list of 3,000 from 50 countries participating in the European Mobility Week. The main focus this year is on measures to ensure sustainable and efficient mobility.

Children and parents go to school Photo: Inquam Photos / Alex Nicodim

Although it hardly appears in the public space, school mobility, or in other words how children move from home to school or other extracurricular activities and back, is an issue that affects us all, whether we are parents or not. No. If we live in medium-sized and large cities with a population of more than 150 thousand inhabitants, we cannot avoid this. In the morning, the time when students have to get to class coincides with peak traffic. The story repeats itself in the afternoon when the children return home.

We know exactly what this means: cities choked with traffic and pollution, traffic jams, blocked streets, nerves on edge, cars standing on sidewalks and crosswalks, children running through cars parked by other parents ( only two minutes, right?) – and the list goes on. Every year, in the month of September, with the end of the academic year, we are bombarded with an avalanche of articles and reports in the press, which, in written or screened form, present a gloomy and sad image of the modern urban environment. But the image does not disappear in October. We continue to see her throughout the year.

Paradoxically, yesterday’s schoolchildren, that is, today’s parents, easily remember the way to school on foot or, in some cases, by bus. However, now the “older generation” spends hours every day driving the child to any scheduled activity.

It is a big logistics in the middle, in which not only parents are involved. Going to school has become a family affair, where mom, dad, as well as grandparents, nannies or relatives come to adjust their daily calendar according to the children’s schedule, and also guarantee a part-time job as parents – taxi drivers (Elterntaxi), borrowing the term from the German vocabulary. The term “taxi parents” refers to parents who take their children everywhere by car. Thus, going to work and studying merge into family team building.

Read about the scale of the problem on Panorama.ro.