The Picture turned it into a celebration in late summer last year. The holidays were just over, school started – and everyone is already stuck in the “parent taxi traffic jam”. And not just any vehicles, but “electric giants, sports cars, off-road vehicles”. In this case it wasn’t just any parents driving their children to school, but rather parents from the Taunus. And it wasn’t just any school in front of which there was suddenly a 400-meter queue in front of which the horns were honking and engines were howling in front of which, when school started in the morning, it was a private school. Rich moneybags drive their wealthy brats into elite schools, that’s what that means. Buses and trains, on the other hand, are empty.
You don’t have to stand in front of a private school to make such observations; you can easily spot cars with small crumple zones in the morning school traffic. And you certainly don’t have to look to Hesse, the phenomenon is about as old in Bavaria. Even in Augsburg, the so-called parent taxis are notorious. According to its own description, the Swabian metropolis is so weak in terms of income and other financial resources that you would sometimes think that people here only know about SUVs through hearsay. Of course that’s not the case, which is why the city is now actively countering the fact that so many parents take their children to school by car instead of letting them walk. And that in the big city, where the distances are not nearly as long as in the country.
“Leave the parents’ taxi” is the name of the campaign at Augsburg elementary schools, which is intended to encourage children to walk to school. For every day that a child manages to get to school without a car, they can have a stamp entered on a bonus card. At the end of the school year, all fully stamped cards will be part of a raffle. The prizes: tickets for the swimming pool, for museums and probably also for FC Augsburg games. The school that collects the most fully stamped cards will receive a special prize.
“Parents who bring their children by car endanger other school children when traffic becomes confusing,” says education officer Martina Wild. When school starts, the children are old enough to go to school and back on their own. To ensure that as many parents as possible share this view, stamp cards for adults could become necessary.