New Schools, Wrong Places: Integrating Transport and Education Policy
Key Takeaways
- Transport and school location strategy need to be better integrated.
- Requiring children to attend their nearest school is an ideology dressed up as a transport solution, putting the system's needs ahead of children's educational needs.
- New schools are routinely built where land is cheapest, which is also where car dependency is highest, and public transport is weakest.
- Total cost accounting for new schools must include transport infrastructure, not just land purchase and construction.
- Free parking at schools does what free parking always does: it fills, and it makes driving the expected behaviour.
- Charging for parking and reflecting transport costs in teacher remuneration is a better approach than simply restricting or providing spaces.
- Autonomous vehicles will increase vehicle kilometres travelled to and from schools, not reduce them, making honest pricing more urgent, not less.
- Free public transport for students appears to predominantly shift trips from walking and cycling rather than from cars, which is the wrong trade-off.
- The multimodal approach prioritises safe walking and cycling infrastructure for those within range, with public transport providing genuine coverage for those who are not.
What Next?
Are you integrating transport and school location strategies?
Introduction
Transport and urban planning need to be better integrated. Most transport and urban planning professionals would agree with that. But there is a quieter, less examined version of the same problem: the failure to integrate transport and school location strategy.
The consequences show up everywhere. More children being driven to school than ever before. Large car parks occupying valuable school land. New schools built where public transport is weakest. And transport departments left to manage the demand that education departments created.
This blog examines several dimensions of that failure: whether encouraging local school attendance is a credible transport solution, where new schools are being located and why, the parking challenge for teachers; and what a genuinely multimodal approach to school accessibility would look like.
The argument throughout is the same. Transport should enable children to access the right school for their needs. But transport cannot simply be a taker of education policy, reacting to decisions already made. Getting this right requires both departments to make decisions together, earlier, with a clearer view of the total costs involved.
School Choice and Transport: A False Trade-Off
One response to the school transport problem deserves to be addressed directly, because it sounds reasonable but isn't: simply requiring children to attend their nearest school.
The logic is appealing. Shorter distances mean more children within walking and cycling range. Less travel means less traffic. The transport problem, on this view, largely solves itself.
The problem is that it misunderstands what schools actually are.
Schools are not interchangeable. Even small primary schools specialise in how well they serve children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, in language, in religion, in their capacity to support children with special educational needs. State schools are not delivering the same thing, and pretending otherwise does not make it true.
I have some grounding in this. I spent eight years as a school governor across two state primary schools, taught in schools earlier in my career, reviewed school performance as a councillor, and am a parent of three neurodiverse children. The idea that every child's needs can be met by whichever school happens to be closest to their home is not a workable policy position. It is ideological and will harm children.
Forcing children into unsuitable schools to reduce trip distances puts the transport system's needs ahead of children's educational outcomes. That is the wrong trade-off.
But the reverse is equally wrong. Transport cannot simply absorb whatever demand education policy generates and be expected to cope. The answer is not to subordinate one to the other. It is to integrate both, so that school location decisions are made with transport consequences in mind from the start, and transport planning treats educational accessibility as a genuine objective, not an afterthought.
The false solution, in other words, is not just the local school mandate. It is the assumption that this is primarily transport's problem to solve.
The Location of New Schools
If the local school mandate is the wrong answer, the right question becomes: where should new schools be located, and who gets to decide?
At the moment, the answer is effectively determined by land cost. Education departments are typically responsible for delivering new schools within tight capital budgets. Cheap land is available at the urban fringe. New housing growth is also happening at the urban fringe. The two facts combine to produce an entirely predictable pattern: new schools are built in locations with low density, weak public transport, and poor walking and cycling infrastructure.
And because the roads surrounding these sites were never designed for school traffic, the infrastructure costs can be substantial.
To illustrate how substantial: one new school I am aware of faced road upgrade costs that exceeded the cost of building the school itself. The education department had assessed the site based solely on land purchase and construction costs. The road infrastructure bill landed elsewhere, in this case, triggering a dispute between education and transport over who should pay.
This is a direct consequence of not accounting for total cost. If the full capital cost to government had been on the table from the start, land, construction, and transport infrastructure combined, a more central location with existing transport links might well have been the better business case, even at a higher land price. A smaller footprint, less parking, higher density buildings, rooftop play space: these are all viable design responses that evidence suggests have no meaningful impact on educational outcomes. What determines educational outcomes is the quality of teaching and learning, not the configuration of the building around it.
The traffic modelling that accompanies these decisions compounds the problem. Predict and provide approaches start from the assumption that demand will be met by car, and design accordingly. A vision-led approach would ask a different question: given where this school is located, what walking, cycling and public transport access is achievable, and how do we design for that from the outset?
One promising structural response is to integrate new schools into transit-oriented development. A school located within a well-connected mixed-use development can draw its local catchment on foot or by bicycle, while students travelling from further away have genuine public transport options.
This requires education and transport departments to make decisions together before a site is selected and requires total cost accounting, including transport infrastructure.
School Parking
School parking sits at the intersection of two problems: the specific challenge of teacher recruitment and retention, and the broader failure to price roads and parking.
Start with the teacher problem. Teachers frequently live far from the schools where they work. In well-connected urban areas, this may not matter much; existing public transport can absorb the commute. But new schools, as discussed, tend to be built where public transport is weakest. If a school cannot offer parking, and cheap street parking nearby is unavailable, it becomes harder to recruit and retain staff. This is the same dynamic that drives out-of-town industrial parks to provide free employee parking: the location creates the dependency.
The underlying cause, however, is that driving is systematically underpriced. Roads are free at the point of use. These subsidies increase car use, reduce public transport patronage, and make the alternatives less viable for everyone, including teachers. Fixing road pricing would do more for school accessibility than any parking policy aimed specifically at schools. But road pricing reform is a much larger undertaking.
Within that constraint, what can schools do?
The worst approach is to provide free parking and leave it there. Free parking at the point of use does what it always does: it fills up, signals that driving is the expected behaviour, and makes the alternatives less attractive by comparison.
A better approach is to charge for parking and reflect transport costs in teacher remuneration. A teacher who does not use the car park takes home more. One who does pays for the space they occupy. This creates a genuine financial incentive to consider alternatives where they exist. Alongside this, where unrestricted street parking surrounds the school, residents' permit schemes offer a way to bring order to what is otherwise an uncontrolled spillover problem.
Looking further ahead, autonomous vehicles will change this calculation, but not in the way that is sometimes assumed. AVs are likely to increase the distances teachers are willing to travel, because productive time in a vehicle reduces the cost of a long commute. And AVs that drop off and reposition will add to vehicle kilometres travelled rather than reduce them. The arrival of AVs is not an argument for deferring action on school parking. If anything, it strengthens the case for getting pricing right now, before new travel patterns become entrenched.
School parking is an expression of a transport system that has consistently underpriced driving and overprovisioned car access. Schools can take steps to better manage parking within that system. But the system itself needs to change.
A Multimodal Approach To Schools
The shift away from children walking and cycling to school is one of the most visible symptoms of a transport system designed around the car for decades. It is also one of the most consequential, for children's health, for congestion around schools, and for the travel habits children carry into adulthood.
We largely know what works. The interventions that shift school trips away from cars and towards walking, cycling and public transport are well established. Lower speeds in residential neighbourhoods, not just on the street immediately outside the school gate, reduce the perceived and actual danger that leads parents to drive. Junction upgrades that prioritise pedestrians and cyclists make the routes children use safer. School streets schemes, which close roads around schools during pick-up and drop-off, remove the conflict between arriving cars and children on foot. Walking buses and cycling buses provide structured, supervised active travel for younger children. Secure, well-located bike parking at schools removes a practical barrier.
None of these are new ideas. The constraint is prioritisation and funding.
Free or heavily discounted public transport for students is a more contested intervention, and the evidence warrants closer examination than it usually receives.
Scotland provides a useful case study. In 2022, Scotland extended its National Entitlement Card to under-22s, providing free bus travel across the country. The results from the most recent Hands Up Scotland survey are instructive. Bus use has risen for five consecutive years and now stands above pre-pandemic levels. But active travel to school has continued to decline, and the proportion of pupils being driven has reached its highest recorded level.
These results suggest that free bus travel is drawing trips away from walking and cycling rather than from cars, a poor outcome.
The argument sometimes made in defence of free fares is that embedding public transport habits early will pay dividends in adult travel behaviour. That may be true. But habit formation cuts both ways. Reducing walking and cycling among children to grow bus patronage is not the sort of habit replacement we should be encouraging.
Unfortunately, we rarely ask the question: what would the same investment achieve if directed at the infrastructure and programme interventions described above: safer streets, better crossings, school streets, cycling infrastructure, rather than free fares? I am sure the benefits would be far greater.
The multimodal approach to schools is about making walking and cycling the natural, safe, and attractive choice for the majority of children who live within range, while ensuring that public transport provides genuine options for those who do not. That requires investment in infrastructure, in services, and in street design.
Conclusion
New schools built on cheap land at the urban fringe generate car dependency by design. Free public transport for students often shifts trips from walking and cycling, not from cars. And parking provided free at the point of use for teachers encourages more driving.
This is the predictable result of siloed decision-making, where education departments optimise for land costs, transport departments react to the resulting demand, and no one is accountable for the total cost to the government or to children.
The fix is not to force children to attend their nearest school and call it a transport solution. Children's educational needs are too varied and too important for that. The fix is to integrate the decisions upstream, in where schools are sited, how they are configured, and how transport access for both students and teachers is planned from day one.
Schools located within or adjacent to well-served urban areas, designed with minimal parking and strong access to active and public transport, produce better transport outcomes without compromising educational outcomes.
Transport planners and education departments need to be in the room together before a site is chosen, not arguing over whose budget pays for the road upgrades afterwards.