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In this vein, the large changes in traffic between the school holidays (especially in the summer) and back at school is one of the reasons (other than its much cheaper, for obvious reasons) why I choose my annual holidays just before/after the school holidays.
It can make the journey to the West Country about and hour or so less and riving around whilst I'm there far easier, as long as I avoid the rush hour periods. Not to mention the tourist attractions are much less busy!
I agree that during the school holidays, especially ones other than the longer summer holiday, I try and avoid (as far as possible) using retail/leisure parks (shopping, cinema, etc) as they are heaving with screaming kids running/mucking about and distracted parents driving and parking badly.
I've often seen many a near miss or cars get scraped at this time and now often wait a couple of weeks when a film I want to see is released to go and see it - besides, you get a better choice of seats and don't have to book in advance or wait in a huge queue at the fast food restaurant.
I suspect the local estate parking issue depends upon the mix of families and those without kids, and often how near they are to the local station, town centre, workplaces or other amenities - parking during the day used to be a really big problem where I live, especially during the school holidays, because the extra residents' cars meatn that those non-residents (illegally) parking to avoid paying the nearby station car park fees and the overspill for the local factory/offices lead to hardly any spaces available.
Now we have private parking control, few problems during the day, more so in the evenings and at weekends when most people are home (a good number of residents own more cars than they are allocated spaces) and have visitors.
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