06/07/2008 18:18. IF YOU are going to drive your precious little things to school, then use a big diesel SUV, like the BMW X5 3.0d.

No, I'm not trying to get the greenies all fired up. It's actually a green thing to do, if you car-pool.

Of course, it's not as good as sending the children on the bus, but that's not always practical.

Where we live, the bus stops more than 1km from home and my daughter would have to take two buses and a train to get there. It would take nearly an hour while the same trip in a car is about 15 minutes.

A road statistics collector for the NSW Road Transit Authority recently told me the biggest social change in the past 20 years to affect traffic congestion was not population or vehicular growth but the trend towards driving children to school.

You only have to see how... // Courier Mail