Back to school

Here it is the first couple of weeks of kids going back to school in the Toronto area. When kids go back to school it means a new routine for both them and their parents. The sleeping in until whenever doesn’t happen during the week anymore and there are schedules for going to bed as well which I think kids are going to be fighting for a while.

Something else that happens at this time of year is that the roads get busier because of course more people are back to their own routine. One of the things that makes me laugh about where we live is the number of parents that drive their children to the public school and drop them off. From where we live the distance to the front of the school is 350 meters so not very far at all. If I was to walk from where we live to the playground for the school is about 400 meters or around 5 minutes to walk. The advantage of walking is it is good exercise and in a lot of ways it is closer because if you drive the children to school, they have to go down into the parking garage to get to the car and then after getting out of the car they still have to go into the playground before they go into the school so they are probably walking the same distance and you are using gas, etc.

Back to school also means that overall, more cars are on the road because it isn’t just the elementary to high school students that are back to school it is also all the universities and colleges that have returned to campuses so a lot more people are commuting. Besides all the students that are getting to the schools there are all the staff that need to get back as well.

So, for the first couple of weeks of when everyone is going back to school it means that the traffic paths are going to change from what they were during the summer. Everyone now must learn to deal with these new traffic patterns even if you don’t have anyone returning to school. Even a simple trip to the grocery store can be impacted because of either students getting out of school and wanting to get home quickly or the school buses that are now on the roads as well.