Don't blame the schoolchildren for Dublin's traffic problems, writes Kathryn Holmquist

When people complain about cars clogging up the roads unnecessarily, they always seem to pick on children and parents. Cars are considered essential for work, but an optional luxury for the school-run. Parenting isn't as important as work, you see.

We parents and children are lazy, obviously. We're becoming overweight because we're not walking enough. We're polluting the environment because we can't be bothered to walk our children to school on dangerous roads, in the rain, with heavy schoolbags and young children in buggies. Oh - and stop off on the way home from some groceries, while you're at it. You can balance them on your head.

If you're like me, with three children on three different school schedules who also need to be ferried to a variety of other non-school activities, plus doctors' and dentists' appointments, you know how infuriating being told to walk is. If I were to walk my children to school - with their 15 different pick-up times - I'd spend eight hours a day walking, and so would my children - since I can't leave younger ones home alone while I go to collect older ones.

But Michael Ahern, of the Dublin Transport Office, thinks that more children should walk to and from school. Parents ferrying their children around unnecessarily are clogging up roads and - even worse - affecting their children's health by depriving them of exercise, he believes.

Ahern is the father of three children aged five and under, with a fourth on the way. Last week, shortly after giving his views on the radio programme Morning Ireland, he headed off to buy an MPV. A people carrier is the only way of getting all those children from A to B, he explained.

It's nice to see a public official getting in touch with reality.

To be fair to Ahern, his is a one-car family (like mine) and he brings his five-year-old to school every day on the DART. Most days he goes to work on the DART. But what's he going to do when he has four school-going children? He says that the new survey of primary pupils and parents being undertaken by the Dublin Transport Office aims to discover what people need and want.

He thinks that more children would be walking or cycling to school if roads were safer. Good point. Part of the survey will be to find out where the dangerous points are.

But he also suggests that parents living in estates club together and hire private school buses. Why should they have to pay for this? Isn't that the State's responsibility? Ahern thinks that sending children to school via "walking buses" is also a good idea.

Who's going to man the buses - the few mothers who are left working full-time in the home? Are they supposed to fill in the gaps in transportation, like they already do with so many other school-related activities? Bringing your children to school on foot is a matter of "getting organised", says Ahern.

Believe me, I'm well organised. I wouldn't be able to work full-time and rear three children any other way. There is no way that my family could get around on foot, carry everything they have to carry and get everybody where they have to be on time. The very notion of engaging in modern family life solely on foot harkens back to some imaginary era à la Alice Taylor in To School Through The Fields.

Yes, some families are fortunate enough to live within walking distance of the schools their children attend. Some families live in areas where they can cycle without taking their lives in their hands. But this is increasingly rare.

And even when children are old enough to walk or cycle, would you want them to? Would they survive the journey? Then there's the weight of the school-bags, so heavy that a child asked to carry one for a mile will develop a back problem.

Ahern says children need a degree of freedom and independence which the walk home from school provides. Yet most adolescent drug and alcohol abuse and accidental pregnancy occurs between the hours of 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., according to some studies. Parents want to keep tabs on their children, and collecting them from school is one way to do it.

Personal safety is another issue. I pointed out to Ahern that if my 10-year-old were to cycle to school, she would have to use a busy narrow road, which reaches a cycle path at the top. This cycle path follows around a deadly roundabout where the cycle lane is lethal. Ahern replied that this particular roundabout, in Glenageary, is currently not recommended for use by cyclists because it is too dangerous. Thanks for telling me.

Let young healthy workers, without children to transport, cycle their way around. It's the workers in their huge company cars who cruise in and out of the city every day and leave their cars parked, uselessly, taking up city space, that should be the focus of any public initiative to discourage car use.

I agree with Ahern that our ideal should be a "living city" where people cycle or walk, but for the majority of families, crucial services are not within walking distance and the roads are dangerous. Dublin city and suburbs was cobbled together without thought to "living cities" or accessible services and it's too late to change that. Don't blame the school-run.