As for my friend, in the first week of the new school year, he decided to let his daughter study at a school in a difficult Tay Ho. The nearly 8km journey turned into a stressful journey.
"There were days when it was only a few hundred meters from the school gate but it took 20 minutes to get there," he shared.
For many years, although the police, traffic police, and self-management forces have struggled to regulate traffic, the congestion in front of the school gate still occurs frequently. For example, there are nearly 30 locations of traffic jams in the area, concentrated in school areas such as Vu Ngoc Phan, Khuong Thuong, Nguyen Hong streets...
The road I take from home to work has at least two schools with many students, Hanoi - Amsterdam Specialized School and Nguyen Sieu School. These are two bottlenecks when parents pick up and drop off their children.
Some schools find solutions by encouraging parents to stop their vehicles 10-15m from the gate. Teachers, security guards and workers help bring students to school. This method partly helps to significantly reduce the scene of motorbikes and cars crowding in front of the gate.
Hanoi City Police said that the city is replicating the model of "safe school gates" and requires schools to sign a commitment with parents not to stop parking for arbitrary purposes.
To solve this problem, experts say that many solutions need to be synchronized: Re-planning the school network to avoid crowding students in the inner city; deploying school buses; extending school hours to reduce peak hour pressure; at the same time, expanding sidewalks and arranging parking lots near schools so that parents do not park for free.
And another issue that needs to be implemented soon is to move universities out of the inner city. Hanoi has calculated this for a long time to reduce traffic congestion but it is not effective.
The story of tens of thousands of parents struggling with traffic jams because of taking their children to school, if carefully calculated, will see a great waste of time, effort, money and greatly affect labor productivity. Without fundamental measures, the "road traffic jam" will continue, directly affecting the quality of life of the people of the capital.
