Well that headline sums it up. After 10 years of dealing with it and wondering "how the f did we get to this point", it's satisfying to hear it called what it is.
A small win in our family was in my son's final year of elementary school when he finally decided to try walking home 1.5 miles; that Spring was a delight for him. He was properly decompressed and had logged a minimum amount of physical activity for good sleep and all the rest.
Pay for the buses! Build the greenways! Normalize walking! And stop worrying about abductions for the love of gawd!
Everyone here should watch the Japanese TV series, Old Enough!. 2-4 year olds are sent out on their own to run errands, etc. Yes, really, 2-4 years old. And they succeed and are fine.
That wouldn't work in US until the whole culture changes. An individual family may do this, and then someone will call child protective services because there is a lost, unaccompanied child.
Happened to my coworker: kids were playing outside and a neighbor called the authorities on them. Not clear if they really thought the kids were in danger, or just did it out of spite, but what ensued was a nightmare of CPS calling the workplace and a few follow-up house visits. The sad part is everyone involved can turn around and claim "we were worried about the children" and use that as a shield for whatever overzealousness or maliciousness may hide underneath.
>That wouldn't work in US until the whole culture changes.
This is one of those things laws are great at. Delete the power of idiot Karens and the culture will return to normal.
It works for Utah (and to a point, Texas); it can work for your polity, too.
When children are at far greater risk of abuse and abduction by concern trolls and the State, and they very much are in New World countries, your society is broken.
> This is one of those things laws are great at. Delete the power of idiot Karens and the culture will return to normal.
How? Those idiot Karens are the ones writing the laws. They get on your state legislature and local town ordinances, and prevent more housing from being built too.
They have no competence and they do everything in the name of "safety", so you can't challenge them with logic or reason.
They are usually very privileged people with plenty of time on their hands so you can't play asymmetric warfare with them and expect to win.
> The sad part is everyone involved can turn around and claim
As a mandatory reporter if I don't report such a thing I can be put in prison. Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters (only mandatory reporters are allowed to go camping with scouts). I'm specifically told not to think, if there is any possibility I must report it and let the experts figure out if there is a problem or not.
This of course means the experts have to spend a lot of time/effort investigating where it is obvious there is nothing but they have to get enough evidence of that to close the case. This time is taken away from all the kids that really need help. Note that I have no idea how many kids who need help are discovered this way.
> As a mandatory reporter if I don't report such a thing I can be put in prison. Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters (only mandatory reporters are allowed to go camping with scouts). I'm specifically told not to think, if there is any possibility I must report it and let the experts figure out if there is a problem or not.
There are some issues here with what you're saying.
Mandatory reporter classifications are a legal construct. Activities can't make people into mandatory reporters. Only some mandated reporters are subject to reporting requirements when off-duty (for example, in many jurisdictions, your scout camp 'chaperones' may well not be obliged to mandatory report. Teachers and HCPs may, however, be. And it may vary for WHAT they are reporting.)
I am a mandatory reporter (healthcare provider), and I specifically called out that jurisdictions, occupations, and events or situations may tweak that.
> Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters
I was specifically commenting that an activity doesn't make someone a mandatory reporter. That is you are a mandatory reporter based on your occupation, status, and what is happening. The OPs comment makes it sound like "if you're camping overnight with children, you become a mandatory reporter"
versus, for example, "The BSA's policy is to only allow people who are already designated mandatory reporters to chaperone camping overnight with scouts". The BSA cannot ... mandate ... that you are a mandatory reporter (in the legal sense, with protections and responsibilities accompanying) just by virtue of you saying "I'll chaperone this event" (though they can certainly say "it is our policy that you act as-if").
Their policy is probably only act as if. The training I'm given doesn't go into such details though.
Come to think of it, they say it is mandatory to report, but are careful to avoid talking about the law. However it is recorded I have training. I would honestly expect the courts decide that I'm legally a mandatory reporter if it was discovered I should have seen something, even if I don't technically meet the law. (at least if they can find any way to read the law to get me)
That makes absolute sense. And I think it's quite deliberate to not talk about the law. And I have no objections to a policy that 'we expect you to report concerning things' and disqualifying you if they learned you didn't.
All of this is of course on top of any moral or ethical imperatives about reporting suspected abuse, mandated or otherwise.
>kids were playing outside and a neighbor called the authorities on them
The worst part is that someone would thing this is the appropriate thing to do rather than observe the kids and in any case approach them and ask if they’re OK. The US has grown a culture of “don’t get involved” cowards hidden behind the legal system.
The coworker never found out who that was and talking about he kind of suspected it was a just a neighbor that didn't like them. And like you said, they can always hide behind "I don't know I was just worried about the children".
I understand that’s terrifying in the moment to have CPS at your door, but maybe the erroneous CPS visit is a one time cost we have to pay to change the culture, until CPS learns to ignore phone calls with no more details other than “children are outside”. If they don’t learn to ignore them - that sounds like lawsuit territory
Change requires someone that doesn’t accept the status quo
(I don’t have kids, but hope to have some in the future, so this is me talking out of turn)
> If they don’t learn to ignore them - that sounds like lawsuit territory
It's the reverse. CPS could be found liable if they ignored a report where there were indeed problems.
Also, I have family that work in CPS and it's really not the bad guy everyone that's "anti-CPS" seems to think. They have a HIGH bar to go over before they'll remove kids from a home. Things have to be particularly bad. And even then, the organization is slanted to get the kids back into the home ASAP. The state doesn't want to have to take care of kids.
Most of the time, it's work with the parents to make the environment safe.
I really dislike it when Japan is brought up as a comparison with the US, especially when it comes to crime or schooling. The cultures, poverty levels, and crime rates are so vastly different that it's never helpful.
Japan is a monoculture and strictly traditional, not to mention very xenophobic. Everything works because the social penalties for violating those norms are severe. It’s effectively an ethnostate and not that long ago revered their god-emperor.
The U.S. is by contrast a diverse (geographically and demographically), broad culture of immigrant communities based on a concept of rugged individualism where states and townships run things as they see fit.
If you want to reshape the U.S. in the model of Japan … well
Not to reshape America into Japan, but attempt to keep the parts that are nice while integrating the best parts of other nations. America loved to claim it was a nation of immigrants; the French even sent you a gift for how much America would take the best of other countries (the brightest minds, the hardest workers), and build with that.
Maybe that's not how the country works any more, but it was a nice fantasy.
America has an obsession with being different and has a thousand answers to why things that work elsewhere would not and could not possibly work here. It's the size, if it's not the size, it's the density, if it's not the density it's ... repeat ad nauseam.
There is much to learn from them. However there are dark sides of their culture too. They have high suicide rates, and are very xenophobic (much worse than Trump in the US) for starters. We can learn, but be careful as it isn't always clear which factors you want to emulate are tied to things you don't.
It is if you consider cultures, poverty levels, and crime rates to not be immutable geographic traits, but a result of policy choices. The US can't take a giant leap to kids having Tokyo-like freedom, but it can look at what Japan does differently that results in such a society (eg. its public education system, public transit, policing, street design, typical vehicle size, etc).
You cannot legislate positive cultural attributes into being. There's no way to fine people into reading to their kids, picking up trash when they see it, deciding to put the grocery cart back, prioritizing academic achievement, etc.
It takes a lot more than legislation, but Japan's modern culture is in large part the product of its education system. It has a strong focus on teaching exactly that sort of prosocial behaviour.
Sure, but if you spend time in Japan you really will see five-year-old kids walking long distances and taking transit to school and running errands unaccompanied.
Agreed, I saw it firsthand while I was there. The elementary school was near the train station I had to take to get to university, and there was always a line of little kids walking themselves there every morning.
In grad school, a friend from China explained that he stayed home on his own starting at like age 3. He was going down to the market outside his high rise apartment, buying basic groceries, and entertaining himself all day. It blew my mind, he saw nothing wrong with it.
That’s quite a tale you were told. As a parent I can tell you my children barely even remember being 3yo, let alone have the ability to reach the shelves and pour their own beverages at that age
The exact same people calling CPS on kids walking down the street claiming it's too dangerous are the people who advocate for turning communities into low-trust economic zones.
The reason it's more dangerous now is because of them.
They privatized profit (in this case, the warm fuzzies of addicts shooting up on playgrounds) and socialized risk.
That is pollution. We should clean up that pollution, and ban those who created it from causing more.
Push this out thirty years. One set of kids was navigating the real world since they were 4. The other has been mollycoddled with overparenting and screen time. Which cohort do you think will be happier, better adjusted and better off?
Then realise that it's not uncommon to see grade schoolers taking the subway to and from school in New York.
Consider that the fact that there’s a tv show about it means it’s a novelty in Japan as well.
It’s great that Japan has a civil society that makes a show like that possible, but don’t mistake it for more than it is. It’s the same mistake as generalizing from what you read in the news: it’s news because it’s unusual.
No, it really is commonplace in Japan. It makes good TV because little kids are cute as heck. Not everybody has kids, and even if you do, they don't remain five years old forever. So even mundane stories about little kids can stay popular.
There's more to growing up and being "well adjusted" than walking around as a child, for example the freedom to explore who you are without the "nail that sticks up is hammered down" treatment. I also enjoy a certain amount of diversity (in every sense, from thought to people) that simply isn't tolerated in Japan.
> more to growing up and being "well adjusted" than walking around as a child
Sure. Which of those cohorts do you think has more freedom?
> also enjoy a certain amount of diversity (in every sense, from thought to people) that simply isn't tolerated in Japan
You’d have a point if Japan were the only culture in the world with competent 4-year olds. They’re not. We’re the exception. To the extent there is a bubble it’s the American culture of isolating and surveilling kids to and from school.
Forget Japan for a moment. Walking to and from school unattended is perfectly normal in many countries in the EU. The normalisation of car journeys in the US is bizarre
.
There is no "US" where something like this is normalized, it's down to region, weather, urbanization and perception of safety. I grew up walking and biking to school because I was lucky enough to live in a nice suburb close to my school. For people who need to take a 20 minute *drive* to school obviously that isn't feasible.
The US is a massive country with a huge number of different climates and layouts, which is partly what makes articles and conversations like this so painful to read. Instead of the skeptical, critical thinking you'd expect from HN you get mess of "Car bad" "I wish we had European public transit" and broad generalization talk.
When they started the pickup lines, I started just parking about half a mile away from the school. He knew exactly where I would be and we completely avoided the traffic and insanity of that nonsense.
We live about a mile from his current school, so he rides his bike whenever the weather permits. He's always in a good mood when he gets home.
I think it's funny that when he gets older, he'll be able to say that it was uphill both ways since we have a sizeable hill between home and school.
My kids having been cycling a mile each way to school since they were 5 years old. It's definitely doable, although we're fortunate enough that we aren't both working long days, and are well off enough that school is that close.
A mile is not close. Disclaimer: I am european. Grew up in ireland. Lots of cars, but unless you're in the countryside or its raining, it's generally walk/cycle to school. In Stockholm now, you are 'shamed' if you drive to school to drop your kids off. "Normal" parents have cargo bikes to bring their small kids to school if it's a long distance (like 500m or more).
You must have a lot of schools. I walked or biked about a mile each way to school starting in third grade (age 8-9), and the only reason I didn't do it a year earlier was that the two other kids who would accompany me were a year younger.
I only got dropped off if it was raining (that can be quite severe and thunderstorms are common) or if I was so late that I couldn't make it. In the latter case, I walked home.
Four years later, my school was miles away. No choice but dropoff lines (private school, no bus service). Had I been in the public school system, I would have needed to bus or be dropped off for junior high (that year and two after it, ~4 mi/6.5 km away traveling on and crossing multiple arterial roads without bike lanes or sidewalks for most of the way), but could have walked/ridden/driven myself to high school.
Housing in Europe is very different from what it is in the US.
A lot of it will look something like this [1].
In England, it's actually somewhat unusual to have any space between two homes. Semi and fully detached homes command a fairly high price.
Roads were also not built for cars, so they tend to be much narrower than what you'd find in the US. All that means you'll find a much higher population density. You can even find a bunch of cobblestone roads without much effort.
I'd also say that cities are FAR more walkable than they are in the US. It's almost the reverse of what it is here, it can be easier to walk to the store than drive simply because there's a billion little pathways that lead everywhere.
I've traveled enough in Europe, and not just major cities, to understand this about housing.
However, what is the average size of a graduating class from secondary education? My high school class was quite small, just under 100, but it was an oddity and classes before and since were more like 120-150. Even in elementary school we had around 75 in each year. It is not unusual in larger metro areas in the US to have over 1000 students in each graduating class.
Stockholm is a high density urban environment. Appartment living. 4-6 floor high buildings is the norm. Schools every mile or so would be my guess. Ours is like 300m away. Next closest is 1km and 1.5km. Quite normal, i speculate.
I mean, walkability is a big problem for me. My kid would have to cross multiple busy streets in order to get to school (which is ~3 miles away). We don't have crossing guards either, the only ones we do have are literally at the school property.
His choices were bus or walk (my experiences in the car lines are from days when kids needed to picked up for an occasion) before you jump to too many conclusions.
That kind of upbringing worked out really well for the boomers, we are in this mess because of that.
Kids should have agency and independence, but also a feeling of safety, trust, and security. You cannot force a kid to work against their own safety instinct because of your own selfish comfort.
“but also a feeling of safety, trust, and security”
i agree a little bit. But at what point does the “growing up” part happen? you know…when they turn 18, and have to get a real job (or go to university), doing things that are uncomfortable and maybe not fun?
The process of growing up and becoming more mature is accomplished by challenging yourself and pushing boundaries, to grow as a person.
i guess im saying, it depends. its not as black and white as you suggest. Is the fear irrational? Maybe therapy would help. Or a buddy to walk home with. But you need to _somehow_ help kids grow independent.
Parenting isn’t just about defending your kid’s boundaries on their behalf. It’s also helping your kid to grow and expand those boundaries, and giving them the skills to manage them independently.
The end goal is to create a happy, fully functioning adult.
Providing a feeling of "safety, trust, and security" contradicts "Kids should have agency and independence." The only way they have safety is if you are with them 100% of the time which means 0 independence. I'm not worried about kids because they will natuarally avoid danger. I'm more worried about adults causing harm to kids (America).
> You cannot force a kid to work against their own safety instinct because of your own selfish comfort.
I got this kind of reaction from my son for all kinds of things I made him do by himself that made him uncomfortable. Now that he's 18, he thanks me for it and wonders why all his friends are so entirely unable to do almost anything out in public without help.
I think this article misses the one big problem (as I understand it). It's that schools need to dismiss the kid to their parent. I have family in North Carolina and I understand that cars have the family number displayed, and someone with a radio communicates to the school staff "Car 315 is here", they then find that kid and dismiss them. Just do away with that. When the bell rings, send the kids outside and they will just find their parent. That's how my kids school works and there is no traffic jam.
Just letting the kids out en mass is how my son's school worked until Covid. Then they went to the call out the car as it arrives system as you describe, and they never went back. It is so much worse. Thankfully, my son drives himself to school now so I don't have to deal with it any longer.
Yeah, this seems like a pretty surprising omission from the article. In particular, it stuck out to me at this point:
> In fact, in 2022 only about 28% of US students used the school bus to get to school.1 Using the school bus is trending down, as shown in Chart I. In 1969, about 38% of students used the bus, similar to 2009 with 37.5%, and further dropping in 2017 to 36.5%.
In other words, for nearly half a century, the percentage of students taking the bus only fell by 1.5%, and then five years after that, it fell by an additional 8.5%. It _might_ not be covid, but clearly something became a factor between 2017 and 2022 that wasn't at least as far back to 1969, and I feel like it's the obvious hypothesis that would need to be addressed first.
The call-out has been around at least since the early '00s.
Just like all security theater, it's easy enough to get around. All you need is the same looking card and the identifier. Most of the time, that's just the kid's name on the card. Some color code the card by class grade as well.
I know this as I was helping a friend scoop their kiddos up from school, and they just sent me to the school with the card. Nobody questioned who I was. They just saw the card, radioed the name, and the kiddos were waiting at the curb when I eventually crawled up to the spot. Since the kiddos expected me, there was no "who is that guy" situation. Otherwise, just fake a card and get a prize is how lame this setup is
The pre-school my youngest has this. The middle school my oldest goes to is much more relaxed. I'm fine with treating my 4 year old like she can't be trusted to run around alone, but my 11 year old can.
What I'm not fine with is there is no bus service for the 4 year old, we have to drive her (I bike, but it isn't a great route - we have to cross a busy 4 lane)
>Just letting the kids out en mass is how my son's school worked until Covid.
My kids school worked like that and it was still a mess, primarily because the parents were too stupid to follow the rules as to how to park their cars. I was set up so that everyone parked in parallel rows ||||| but the ones on the right were closest to the exit, so a bunch of people would pull into those rows to the point that they'd wrap around behind the other rows ___| and prevent people from getting into those rows. It was stupid and the school would send out notices and have employees walk down to the end of the row and tell people to move to the next one but it never stayed fixed.
This sums up all of the school pickup problems I see and/or deal with daily.
I also see many parents making dangerous decisions, most of which fit into the “I’ll go now” category, including accelerating quickly to get to the crosswalk before the kids crossing the street do. Just this school year, I’ve seen multiple near misses, with kids jumping back onto the sidewalk to avoid being hit by a parent who just picked up their own kid.
If kids have to be released to their parents and are no longer turned out en masse like they used to be, that will absolutely cause traffic and could very well be the root cause of traffic that exceeds the designed capacity of the school pickup circles.
When I was growing up kids within a mile of the school would walk themselves to school and back home with very few exceptions, often starting with first graders. But even a half mile is a long enough distance that many busy parents in the suburbs would choose to drive it rather than walk it four times a day.
I’m across the street from a school and there is always one parent that parks in my condo building’s driveway and blocks it. It would be too much for them to be in the line!
Then sometimes, they leave their car and go in the school and we are trying to home or leave and they get angry with us!
Yeah, you can see a lot of creativity depending on what's available. Where I once lived in Houston, parents would park at a nearby strip center and huddle around the school exit. And then walk their kid across the 6-lane road (3 lanes in each direction) that Houston is obsessed with building back to where they parked their car.
This sort of thing drives me insane. The people on the polar extremes are (I suspect) part of why we can't have nice things. I've both lived by the school and been a parent, and I badly wish people would practice some empathy and common sense. For example there are some people that will literally sit outside during pickup hours on a lawn chair and yell at people for parking on the street in front of their house (which, btw, is completely legal and there's nowhere else to park within several miles of the school). I've also seen parents park right in front of driveways, blocking people's access to their homes, which is absolutely not ok. It kills me that we can't just have a simple compromise.
Parents: It's never ok to block somebody's driveway! Residents: It's not illegal for people to park on the street in front of your house (assuming they aren't blocking your access of course)
I live near a school. Soccer practice, parents routinely park up and down the street at the far end of the field where their kids are practicing, because the school car park at the other end of the field would be a good two minute walk away. "No parking this side" doesn't apply to soccer practice parking, either, apparently.
And if you want to just do a drive by pickup, sure, no worries, stop in the middle of the street (with cars either side), and have your kids younger sister hop out, leaving the car door open, and go wander down the slope to help her brother with his equipment and carry it back up the slope. No-one else is using the street or lives there, after all, so they can wait a few minutes. Bonus points if you get belligerent with them or flip them off for being "impatient".
That's a lame take from this. Kids/parents fill out forms that state the typical way the students arrive/depart the school. If they are on a bus route, those kids exit the school from a different exit (side/rear of building) so that the buses queuing up do not interfere with the car queue. Walkers typically exit yet a different set of doors.
The parents that arrive early but have kids that are not ready to be picked up is precisely why the queues get out of control. At least with this method the cars are moved along much faster. If a car arrives in the queue but the kiddo is not yet found, when the car reaches the front it is asked to move to a holding spot out of the queue--much like fast food places do when your order is going to hold up everyone else in line.
But it does cause it because every car needs to get checked off. When I was a kid in the 80s, there were still quite a few kids that got picked up, but no one was picking them up from the door. They'd park somewhere around the school within a block or two.
I dunno... I grew up in the 80s/90s and most of us took the bus or walked if we lived within a mile or so. A parent drop-off/pick-up was the exception - going to a doctor appointment after school or something.
My school said you must be at least 2 miles away before they would route buses for pickups. There were exceptions which my neighborhood qualified as there were no sidewalks, and we would have to cross a single lane bridge to cross a 50 foot creek with no pedestrian path. I lived in the boonies, and it was faster for me to cut through cow pastures in a straight line than walking the roads. We just had to make sure the rancher's bull was not going to notice us (or sneakily hang a red handkerchief on one of your buddies' backpack).
And the vehicles are limited by the roads that are available to line up on.
And the roads are limited by the school's ability to acquire land.
And no reasonable school is ever going to set aside any more land for a car line than is absolutely necessary that could otherwise be used to provide more school building/field.
Many of them can't walk home from school. As the article says, most students now live too far away from school (greater than three miles), and many rural/suburban areas have underdeveloped sidewalks and traffic systems.
If three miles sounds like not a big deal, it certainly is when you have short legs, a backpack full of books, and uncooperative weather. I was lucky enough to walk to/from school for most of my schooling. It was only around one mile and it still took 30 minutes. As an adult I would probably balk at a 90-minute commute.
Indeed. My kid could theoretically walk to/from school, but they carry a musical instrument every day along with a backpack full of all of their books. The school doesn't offer lockers anymore because they deemed it "unsafe", so all books and a big Chromebook need to come home each day (and be carried between every class).
I played the trombone in sixth grade. Your kid will be fine carrying anything short of a baritone by that age. It sucks to carry. Switch hands as necessary. Be selective with your books on instrument days. But he or she can manage.
Where I live all schools must provide bus service for kids more than 1 mile away, or if the route to school crosses a busy road. Some kids to get a city bus pass, but the yellow school bus is common. I know other states do it differently.
And yet less 40% of students who live within a mile of school walk regularly. For kids who live <.25 miles, that number is still <50%. Walking a quarter of a mile takes ~5 minutes, maybe a bit longer for a small kid with a large school pack.
Many should be able to walk almost as fast as loading up the car, waiting in the queue, etc.
The parent has already signed a release form at the beginning of the school year that designated their kiddo as a walker, and did not need the parent present. Just like your DoorDash option to not be needed to be present
That's still a huge step back from previous generations, where all kids were expected to find their own way to their parents, whether waiting at home, waiting in the pickup loop, or waiting a few blocks away where it's not as busy.
Maybe you're misremembering some of the details of being a kid, but I know my parents signed forms that told the school that I would be walking to/from school. That was in the early 80s.
I never experience being picked up after school by a parent. Both of my parents worked, so I rode the bus or walked.
What exactly is your problem here though? The fact that kids are kept in a staging area so they are not congregating in the same space that kids that are actively being placed into cars? That's an issue? You'd rather have that area congested with kids not paying attention doing kid things with their friends after school?
Schools (EDIT: feel the) need to dismiss the kid to someone. That could be another parent, in the case of carpooling. It could be a bus driver. The root problem is parents chauffering their kids to and from school.
Sure, yes, didn't mean to imply schools have to do this. Just that a school can satisfy its need to look paranoid while sidestepping the problems cited in the article. The root problem isn't the schools' paranoia. It's the lack of a solid bus system.
Certainly, at a certain age they do. I remember picking up very young cousins. But after a certain age, parents should be able to write a permission slip that allows them to walk home. Just because radio communcation is used does not do away with traffic jams. You're still driving, you're still lining up, and there are still a ton of cars which is what the article was talking about.
Agreed. We don’t have much of a car line since it’s a walk-to-school neighborhood (90% walk). Still, k-2 are dismissed to parents. Once 3rd grade hits it’s open.
Yet that are kids that walk at most schools because they live across the street. Or at least there used to be. And how does that work for a high school that has the same ridiculous lines? 15 year olds know which car takes them home, and sometimes they're riding with peers?
Normally I’d ding a comment like this as low-effort, but… I honestly can’t think of any more appropriate reaction.
I know I’m behind the times, but I was surprised recently when, at an elementary school in the US, they showed me painted lines on the floor of the classroom, indicating the zones out of the line of fire for somebody shooting through the small, jail-like window in the door… apparently they train the babies on this.
I wonder what led up to a system like that—overcompensation for a really big mistake in the past? Abstract fears? The genuine wishes of the parents?
(Edit: looks from sibling comments like this [the pickup line technique] might be a hangover from the excesses of the COVID times…)
> I know I’m behind the times, but I was surprised recently when, at an elementary school in the US, they showed me painted lines on the floor of the classroom, indicating the zones out of the line of fire for somebody shooting through the small, jail-like window in the door
It all seems overdone and ridiculous, but when you get a phone call from your child as they sprint from the school building to the safety of the woods due to shots fired in the building, you're glad they did prepare for the "when to stay" and "when to run" decision...and then after you realize that it's even more ridiculous that they had to use that training.
That was the longest couple hours of my life, but knowing that the kids got the f** outta there made it a bit more bearable.
Uff. I can't even imagine. I'm so sorry for you and your kids alike. And I guess it's not the precautionary floor lines that strike me, it's that this style of violence really is so pervasive—and we've concluded that it's such an inevitable part of childhood now—that the reasonable thing to do is to reify it in the physical architecture of their day-to-day lives. And in training young minds to imagine themselves unarmed in a situation of combat...
Of course we don't get to just choose innocence and be surprised by a style of evil behavior over and over again. But I wonder also sometimes if, just as suicides can inspire people who hear about them, large-scale and permanent institutional response to kids-shooting-classmates gives form and legitimacy to that avenue of acting-out, when disaffected kids think about acting out.
So about 12 people were curious but not too surprised when our American friend told us her experience of a school shooting at her university. She was in a different building to the shooter.
The room was shocked into silence when she said "oh, and there was the time at my elementary school..." and had another experience of guns at a school.
There's no incentive not to take unreasonable precautions.
If something happens and you didn't do everything people imagine could have prevented it, you'll be fired, you'll be sued, and your name will be dragged through the mud.
If you take a bunch of unreasonable precautions and nothing happens, you're fine.
School shootings became very publicized twenty years before the pandemic, Columbine in 1999. School shooting drills and lockdowns became more common afterwards as few realistic solutions have been passed and nothing has been done to mollify the fears of parents.
In roughly 2009 my (mostly very well run) school was freaked out when me and my brothers, all age 9-11, wanted to walk the 1.2 miles home. And honestly the teacher and principal involved were/are among the most reasonable, experienced, pragmatic educators I know. I genuinely think the issue is paranoid parents watching them allow such a behavior just as much as the small chance we get clipped on the sidewalk by an out of control car. Aka they were 99% sure my mom would be fine with us walking home, that we weren't lying about her approval, and that if we were lying and something happened while unaccounted for my parents wouldn't hold her responsible, but we live in a silly society, and people are watching.
> What's more ridiculous is someone probably sued them
I'd almost bet nobody sued them. (I'll extend: I'd be surprised if a parent has ever won such a case.) An idiot parent made a stink at a PTA meeting and nobody could be bothered going head to head with Karen.
First of all another parent making a stink at PTA is a genuine situation to want to avoid. The facebook smear campaigns I've seen against teachers are incredible. Also, they absolutely have been sued, and if I remember I'll link a handful later when home. Or the even more fun phenomenon is other parents calling CPS on parents when they witness their children walking home unattended, and that report is actually pursued and adjudicated.
It's not like they're great at it, either. My wife is very visibly hispanic, and on multiple occasions when she went to pick up our (half white but not at all hispanic looking) kids, they'd send the wrong kids to the car because there were only two hispanic-looking kids left.
An odd choice of dates in the charts: 1969, 2009, 2017, 2022. 40 years between the first two and less than ten between the other ones. I would have liked to see more uniform spacing between the first two to understand whether the change across those 40 years was gradual.
Our family suffers this insanity, too. This is one of the few things my spouse absolutely refuses to budge on: she won't let our child walk, bicycle, or even take the school bus to school because of vague "danger" that the news media is pumping into her. School is only 3 miles away and we live in a peaceful rural-to-suburban area. The kid could walk that distance at midnight and not be even remotely at risk. No facts, statistics or reasoning works.
It's not always easy to find the data you want. When you're writing a blog post like this, you do research and find the studies that you can, published when they were.
I know those gaps are often due to the data coming from different sources and it's not always possible to normalize it and what not, but I'm always super suspicious when they do that. Also when you see results that are like 1953-1986, like maybe the results from 1952 and 1987 invalidate whatever point they want to make, so they used only the section that helps their case.
I totally understand the anxiety. If you get "DANGER!" pumped into you constantly, it's going to be hard to rationalize your way out of that.
Have you two ever tried walking along the road at around the same time? A calm walk along the same path your kids would be taking would put me at ease about the situation if I was in the same spot.
My mom walked me to school until I was in 4th grade. She was a single mom and needed to work, so she decided to let me walk to and from school from then on. I made friends on that walk. 30+ years later, I am still friends with many of them even though we live hours away from each other.
I'm not a parent, so I don't know what I don't know; but, I've observed so many kids being shuffled between school, events, "play dates" where it is harder to build deep relationships outside of the parent's sight. Everything is being curated to "ensure" the kids are safe or on the "right" path.
I understand that we live in a different world, but I really do feel that its to the detriment of the kids.
Kidnappings have been dropping steadily for decades, though maybe it's because kids are indoors more often now. Though FWIW, most kidnappings are from an insane relative, not the random guy promising candy in his van.
I was allowed to play outside unsupervised when I was only 9 years old in 1991, though maybe being on the Keflavik, Iceland US Navy base played a role in that.
80% of kids live too far to walk. It's not that their parents are afraid of kidnappers, it's that they literally cannot feasibly walk to and from school every day.
Because road crossing are genuinely terrifying today. The automobiles are too big and the drivers are too distracted. I have a hard time walking my kids across the street for school sometimes and that's with a crossing guard.
People are fucking nuts and are driving around in these oversized vehicles with their phones in their faces. You can very casually, very trivially observe this any time you want by simply walking down a semi-busy street and looking at the drivers as they go by.
Yeah, it's just insane that within .25 mile of a school, there is insufficient sidewalk and signaled crossings to allow walking. It's a complete failure of urban planning.
It doesn't, in the early 90s I was even younger in the US and I had to walk to school about a mile along a busy street. There was no other way for me to get there, no bus or anyone around to drive me.
I grew up in a suburban area so I am out of touch with the rural experience.
Because the article is comparing the past with the present, I am curious what parents were doing in the 90s in your area? And, what are parents doing nowadays?
I'm assuming, either car or bus. And I can't imagine that would have changed since the 90s unless there used to be a school much closer.
Yea. I get it. Schools are getting farther away. I was lucky to be 2-3 miles away which I think is a reasonable distance. But it really depends on what people are comfortable with which is what this whole article comes down to.
I wonder if this also takes into account families choosing to send their kids to schools farther away. In particular, sending them to private or charter schools that are farther away.
I disagree it is caused by sub-urbanization or zoning. Housing tracts are built with schools.
I would argue the primary cause is an attempt at "school optimization"; the choice to attend the "better" school over the closer school. Also, standardization of schools has decreased with the great variety of charter, private and magnet schools now, increasing the reasons to skip the local school. Personally, I think standardization is best. You could make the same argument about how people choose colleges.
It's in part because every major US city has spent decades underbuilding housing (usually through zoning and permitting that makes middle-density housing implicitly or explicitly illegal), pushing everyone out into the burbs just to find homes they can afford.
It might be due to the school consolidations and schools being moved to cheaper areas.
The article does have a chart that shows distance from their school. I'm curious if there are closer schools that parents chose not to let their child attend. I have known a couple people that drive miles away to drop their kid off to private schools when they have a public school a mile away.
zoning and economies of scale in building out larger schools overall which from a bigger area. throw in pedestrian hostile suburban road design...voila
You also can't really choose to opt out without leaving the country because lots of places make it illegal for your under <13 kid to go anywhere on their own.
Counter point: I used to walk home from school. Got robbed at gun point several times. Jumped for my skin color numerous times. Had a neighborhood buddy who got stabbed three times on his way home and survived. I can go on and on and on. I had to learn to walk an extra 20-30 minutes to avoid these situations. I will never let my kids walk home in 2025.
Edit: no one told these parents to drive up for pick up like a drive-through. In most cases, it is a choice. You can opt to park like a normal person and walk up. This article is absurd. Most of these parents are too lazy to walk 5 minutes. I’ve seen parents show up 40 minutes to be first in queue…just so they don’t have to get out of their cars. Makes zero sense.
I'm sorry for your experience, but this is extremely location dependent.
Walking home from school in many areas is perfectly safe. In other areas it's not. Making blanket statements or restrictions without context doesn't make sense.
So you’re conceding this is location dependent. So in effect you’re saying the article is also location dependent? Pick one. If you knew the statistics on kidnapping or missing children in the US, you would not think of this as a “life-style” choice. By the way, 80% of US population live in urban areas so your experience living in 20% is not representative.
> So in effect you’re saying the article is also location dependent?
The article is literally about how location effects are driving the changes.
> Pick one. If you knew the statistics on kidnapping in the US, you would not think of this as a “life-style” choice.
Child abduction is extremely rare in the United States.
You might be confusing sensational headlines with statistics. It's common to report missing children or parental disputes as kidnapping, which people conflate with children being abducted off the street
For some perspective: The number of children abducted by strangers in the United States every year is similar to the number of children who die from head injuries from riding a bike: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8909479/
More people in the United States die from lightning strikes every year.
There aren’t many places in the US where it is safe AND practical for kids to walk home. If you don’t understand this, then you basically live in a bubble.
You seem to be missing the point. In the vast majority of cases locations being unsuitable for walking/cycling to school isn't an immutable law of nature - it's a result of deliberate choices made by humans.
Building primarily low-density car-dependent suburbs is a choice. Building horribly oversized car infrastructure is a choice. Not building bike or pedestrian infrastructure is a choice. Building one megaschool instead of a handful of smaller local schools is a choice.
People voted to have slightly lower taxes and spend a few hours a week waiting in the pickup line. That's a lifestyle choice, even if they weren't aware they were making it.
The vast majority of the US is not like this. Yes, there are some (generally poor, urban) areas with crime problems. The average middle class town or suburb? Walking to school would be safe, if we simply built sidewalks instead of 6 lane highways.
The majority of the US is absolutely not like this.
You keep accusing other people of living in a bubble, but you're indexing your entire experience on to anecdotes of where you grew up as an individual experience.
Hmm. I don't know the race of the poster you are referring to. I do know from friends who were not White, their experience living in the South was vastly different from mine.
In all honesty, statistically, that person's assertions are highly likely not to be fact.
It's like the man who has happened on "several" three-alarm fires in his life. How many times does a person happen on even one three-alarm fire in a lifetime? Let alone "several". The likelihood you're either speaking to an arsonist or a liar is very high.
Same is true for people who are robbed at gunpoint "several" times. The statistical likelihood that you're either speaking to a criminal or a liar is extremely high.
My parents used to live in a city where violence and crime was common, and I received all sorts of lessons from them about how I shouldn’t go outside, don’t talk to strangers, always be guarded, etc. But my family had moved to a quiet, crime-free suburb and everything they told me seemed like the complete opposite of what I was experiencing in reality when growing up.
When I was young, my family was on food stamps when my parents were laid off.
It took them some time to find work. For some people, they have no choice where they live.
We live across the street from our kids elementary and middle schools. There is a sidewalk and a crosswalk to the school. Parents in our subdivision still choose to drive in because "the crosswalk is too dangerous". Schools can't afford crossing guards, county engineers claim it is an enforcement issue, police can't cover it with their limited staffing, and Republicans are banning school speeding cameras in Georgia.
Crossing guards aren't a substitute for good road design. There should probably be a narrower road by schools to slow people down as well as raised crosswalks. Similar to https://maps.app.goo.gl/TpAiphV8iJZ7j6mY9 as an example. This is across from a school in England where a very high percentage walk
> county engineers claim it is an enforcement issue,
They are probably professional engineers who can lose their license if anyone discovered that there have long been known road designs that prevent this. It will take some research, but the law is on your side to have them dismissed for cause if enforcement is all they are relying on.
It would violate professional standards for a traffic engineer to implement a more pedestrian-safety oriented design at an intersection before the requisite number of children have been killed to justify it.
New York City saw a 55% reduction in fatalities in school zones with cameras, and Oglethorpe County, Georgia reported zero accidents in a high-risk zone for three months after camera installation, compared to 1–2 daily crashes previously.
Using a monthly prevention rate of 0.9–1.4 deaths[0], a ban could result in 10–17 additional fatalities annually per monitored corridor.
So, after how many bonus deaths will Republicans be held liable?
I looked at the author’s Google map view of the 2 miles they couldn’t walk to school, and the enormous grassed area next to the road would have meant I’d be walking that quite happily in the UK.
During nice weather, surely, but it might be very unpleasant when raining.
When I hear these stories about how children in USA go to school, I am always astonished.
In Europe, my parents took me to the school one single time, for the first school day, when I was 6 years old. Everyday after that I have gone there and come back alone, for a walk of about one mile and a half. Several years later, I continued my studies at a more distant school, to which I was going alone using the public transportation of the city, by bus, the same as most of my colleagues.
Even during the 1st grade (i.e. at 6 to 7 years old) any child would have considered very shameful to be brought to the school by their parents, as an indication that they would have been somehow helpless or handicapped.
Yeah, this is much better than the numerous suburbs without sidewalks (such a weird thing from a European perspective) but that country road with ample green space left and right? It's fine. Would benefit from sidewalks and bike lane of course, but the author makes it sound like there is a steep cliff left and right of the road.
> Yeah, this is much better than the numerous suburbs without sidewalks (such a weird thing from a European perspective)
As children in such a situation, we would have a lot of fun as pedestrians to be a nuisance to the cars that drive on the road, too. :-) Having this perspective, I rather think that the reason why sidewalks are built is because of the complaints of car drivers.
As someone who has done a bunch of long distance walks in the UK, I’ve encountered any number of relatively rural or small town roads with no shoulders along walls or hedgerows that are at least as scary as a pedestrian as anything I’ve encountered in the US.
It's not very safe if you can't get off a curvy road with no shoulder, especially in poor visibility. You're probably OK as a bet as a sometimes thing but not something I'd, have especially a kid, do on a daily basis. One reason I didn't learn to ride a bike as a kid because that basically described the road our house was on and fatalities associated with kids riding bikes wasn't rare.
Yeah, "I didn't die taking a jump in a wingsuit" isn't actually a recommendation that's a safe thing to do. Or, hey, plenty of people survived climbing K2.
See here, and deer were hit regularly on the 4m road I walked... but even as a kid I recognised it was kind of dangerous, and I wouldn't want my own kids to do the same.
School?!? Well fiddledeedee which luxury part of Yorkshire are you from?
When I were a lad I used to walk sixteen miles just for a kick up the arse and then have to walk home again to work under t’spinning machine at t’mill for the other 14 hours of the day.
You don't need a pickup truck to be on the phone! It's truly shocking to see just how many (usually speeding!) drivers are on their phones on the highway and elsewhere.
Rural property owners in the US are somewhat likely to shoot first and ask questions about trespassers only later. In some parts of the country the Road is the only obviously public land. (Even that can't be taken for granted sometimes, as private streets exist in some areas, too.)
No they are not. That is what happens in the movies, but in reality those people are just like anyone else - mostly nice people. Even stand your ground laws which allow you to shoot without asking questions only apply in specific situations and are unlikely to apply (though without specific details I cannot say for sure)
Sure, small numbers, low statistics, but it is still in the list of reasons why "Americans don't trust cutting through a random field and see only a dangerous road in a picture like that street view" in some parts of the country. The US has a fascinating relationship to "private property".
It varies from state to state. See "Castle Doctrine" and its variants, including the worst "Stand Your Ground" ones. The US has more pockets of dystopia than are necessarily obvious.
I just want to highlight this link in the article, about a mother who was arrested because her son walked less than a mile into town (population 370) on his own [0]. Arrested. For putting him in danger.
The bus service is completely unreasonable. They shopped it out to the lowest bidder and the stops are all in terrible spots on busy streets. It also takes longer to sit and wait in the cold with a 6 year old than it would be to just drive there and back.
Putting the bus stop on a major road without adequate place to stand is a problem. But a 5 year old is totally capable of waiting for a bus, given the appropriate location to do so. Even more so in a typical suburb, where there's likely several of them waiting at the same place (when I was a kid, we walked half a block to the corner and waiting in a group of ~5-~15 kids).
> It also takes longer to sit and wait in the cold with a 6 year old than it would be to just drive there and back.
I don't know how your bus driver would handle it but even back in the 80s, some parents would drive their kids to the bus stop and let them wait in the car until the bus came. As they got older, like 5th or 6th grade, they would be taught to dress warm for the wait.
Our school system wouldn't send buses if you were within two miles of the school. We were (seriously) 1.99 miles away, so we had to drive our kids back and forth.
Our child was being bullied on the bus by kids twice their age because there was no one other than the driver to monitor. I will not subject a kindergartner to that.
One time the bus arrived a full hour late and the people we could call to ask where it was had already went home. I was considering calling the police. Turns out the bus was late because they didn't have enough busses and it had to complete a different route first.
I live ~1 mile from the local school complex (primary, middle, high all share a gigantic piece of land, though are separate full-size schools). You literally don't have to cross a street to get there from my house - it's all neighborhood walking paths and there's a short underpass at the one road. Yet, kids are not supposed to walk. There's a bus, which isn't the end of the world. Except in the time it takes to wait for the bus, you could walk most of the way to school. And 1/4 of the parents drive their kids anyway.
It's completely absurd.
Of course, I walk the ~1 mile to my office in the other direction and most of my coworkers think I'm a loon. So, I guess this shouldn't be surprising. Americans are just hard-wired to drive even the shortest distances. We've done such a piss-poor job with urban planning and transit design that 3+ generations of Americans think anything but a car is unthinkable (literally, I don't think it crosses their minds).
Reading these comments reminds me that America is a big place and experiences are very different from one location to the next. My closest school has hundreds of kids walking to and from through all the neighborhoods if you drive by during morning or afternoon hours.
My last in-office job had numerous people with 20-40 minute walks as part of their commute (except in rain/winter). We had people who routinely biked 10+ miles to the office.
It's not "Americans are lazy". It's the people you're around.
According to the school. They don't like releasing kids on their own for some reason. neighbors wanted their son to walk home alone and the school said the kid could either take the bus, or a parent could show up and walk him out. Yes, for the same ~1 mile walk I describe above, that's all paved paths in a very safe neighborhood outside DC (Reston VA). Not all of Reston is like this, but out are is VERY walkable (~1 mile to schools, ~1 mile to shopping, ~1.5-2 miles to the town center and Metro station).
I remember an Irish cousin of my mother’s moving to Reno, NV in the 90s. She used to dry her laundry on a line outdoors, where the 40° heat meant that it would dry in minutes. Well, the neighbours found this bizarre almost to the point of being offensive and she got kind of ostracised for doing it… and then she had to join in with what everyone else did and used the dryer for 2 hours burning electricity to achieve the same result that could have been done in 1/4 of the time for free.
This problem is over for me, as my son has graduated, but part of the problem is NIMBY'ified suburban roads that dead-end rather than connecting neighborhoods (in order to cut down on neighborhood traffic).
My son's school was about 250 meters from his mom's house. Due to the NIMBY way the neighborhoods were built, he would have had to ride his bike or walk 2.5 miles on busy roads w/o bike lanes to get to his mom's house. The direct route was 2 dead end roads that should have connected the neighborhoods together. But instead, there was ~30m of dense forest marked with "no trespassing" signs.
This meant that me and his mom had to wait in the school line rather than him being able to walk/bike to and from school. Even when I had custody, I would have much rather picked him up from his mom's house than school because the line was miserable.
I was so happy when he got his license and was able to drive himself.
In the Netherlands they build the neighborhood like that, but at the dead end of the street is a small path for walking/biking. So driving to school would take 2 km, but walking only 500 m.
Yes, this would have been so much smarter. But in this case, they apparently sold extra large lots to the surrounding houses, and made no provisions for pedestrians. Welcome to the USA.
Great article. It wouldn't be that difficult for schools and cities to encourage walking or biking. There are lots of easy things that could be done. My daughter's school doesn't properly clear the sidewalks during winter. The giant parking lot is always immaculate though. They actually renovated and rerouted traffic to make it less safe for pedestrians. My daughter's friend was hit in a crosswalk (with a crossing guard!) by a parent leaving school after dropping her kid off. No penalty to the driver.
I used to walk or take the bus, even in elementary school. I am not sure at what point parents decided they must take their kids to school. We did have parents dropping kids off and it was busy but not like it is now. I know then, at least to me, there was a sort of an air about about seeing kids being picked up or dropped off because they didn't have to ride the bus. Maybe that's it, parents gave in to not wanting their kids to feel less about themselves because they had to ride the bus?
Sometimes I truly wonder how the US is so far ahead in innovation and efficiency. This is unthinkable, how many hours of driving to and fro + this queue each day.
Here I am, in Germany, my kid goes to school by himself since second grade. Most of his classmates started to walk, bike, or take the train, bus or tram themselves at 3rd or 4th grade. Beyond 6th grade, it's considered a spoiled baby.
Thinking through where I've lived -- a lot of the original school buildings built in circa 1950 were more in city center. The article touches on the move of schools to the outskirts of town as a cost savings measure but I think the opposite may be true.
As population and (perceived) facilities increased, the schools built new buildings in farmland or other wide open areas on the outskirts of town to have more room for stuff like stadiums, huge auditoriums, bigger playgrounds. The land may be cheaper but the new high schools are almost more like college campuses vs. stately buildings in the middle of town.
There's an appetite for more and we've relocated schools to make more room not save money.
Schools relocated as parents moved to the suburbs. The schools saw this coming and built schools near those new houses. Schools sometimes see things coming and buy farmland 10-20 years in advance so that when the suburb expands they have the land to build on, but the schools are not built until it is obvious that the parents are coming.
> Likewise, a mom was recently arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk into town.
That linked article is incredible to me (considering how much I used to walk around at that age).
If our culture becomes so backwards that you will actually be criminalized for letting your kids move around independently, then of course we'll be doomed to car pickup lines forever.
Surely behavior of children on a busses plays _some_ role in this decision. Not sure how they would even gather stats on this but busses in my youth were total zoos.
Further, schools near me won't allow many children to walk home even within a safe walking distance with parental consent for (and I quote) "liability reasons". Absurd.
You have to enact protection for the schools from that, or their insurance goes insane (or refuses to be available for any money).
Where I am the school line is mainly to prevent kids from running between the cars; anyone who has been authorized can just be let free and walk home - some of whom just walk a block to where their parent is waiting.
This is the kind of article that needs to get into national culture. We gotta change the way we live. I don't know how to get it to happen, but we need more people doing this.
People need to stop being fucking pussies and actually engage with dumb arguments. It seems people these days are so conflict averse that no one ever speaks up. "We all have our opinions!" Yeah, and sometimes they are stupid.
Yeah, but even things like biking to school. Nothing to do with conflict.
Currently we're a 39 minute walk from school; a little long for a kid at age 8.
We're like a 10 minute drive, in traffic with lights etc, and I think basically a 10 minute bike ride. There isn't a good biking system because the roads are set up like a grid, and there's no walking path through it.
I think for biking culture to thrive you need bike only or bike/ped paths, otherwise you end up having to bike on busy streets or stop at many intersections.
I'm going to try to organize something like a mini bike bus in my neigborhood.
Like many societal issues, support for bike transport would be one way to address this.
To help support that, it should be expected that on the first day of school, police officers will ride bikes along all the routes students are expected to cover --- to help support that, bring back truant officers and put them on bicycles.
I think parental paranoia plays a very small role in this. If at least one thing were to change: reasonable schoolbus routes, walkability, traffic safety, public transport, then we'd see a huge uptick.
Not much to do for most of the parents, TBH, especially if you want to get into a good school.
Me? I picked the public elementary school 10 minutes of walk away instead of the private one that is 20+ minutes of driving. I don't want everyone in the household gets frustrated pretty much every Mon-Fri.
Secondary school is going to be a bit of issue. We do have one that is adjacent to the said elementary school but it is not very good. But then my son would be 11 years old by then so hopefully he can just take the bus.
As the author mentioned the rise of ebikes is counteracting this, however the ones popular with teens (Surrons and other similar chinese brands) require you to cut one wire to remove the speed limiter and then they can do 50MPH.
The idea of common spaces in American cities largely died during & after Covid. Anything you did in public (gyms, eating out, public transport, apartment common areas) was suddenly prey to whatever idea a politician had that morning. I think we all remember walking into a restaurant with a mask on, to promptly take it off as soon as you sat down. At the same time as these guidelines were being piled on, basically all laws below murder stopped being enforced. So you had to negotiate a bus full of drug addicts shooting up and riding for free, or leave the sidewalk because it had been taken over by a tent city.
Personal transport is required in America, the places with the infrastructure to avoid it dont have the capacity to govern (any big city). The places with the governing capacity (suburban, rural areas) dont have the infrastructure.
This is why I was adamant that my kids took the school bus when it is an option.
Even though my family has the flexible schedule to handle dropping kids via car, by using the bus system I help support the community and others who might not have that flexibility.
Plus, the school bus is one of the first places a kid might be without (much) adult supervision. A tremendous growth opportunity, where you learn how to deal with discomfort, difference and drama.
I didn’t understand at the time how much of a privilege it was that I could walk to school where I grew up (with crossing guards for the elementary schoolers, even!) and more importantly that my parents encouraged it, even if it was a bit of a hike to middle and high school without a bike.
Unfortunately we moved during high school and lived something like 15 miles from the new school; at least there was a bus.
This is a good piece that is undermined somewhat by the AI imagery. My goal isn't to just complain about AI, but I've been reflecting on how my own mental process unfolded while reading this.
> Note: I used AI to create this image rather than pull one from another site without permission.
I don't have kids, and while I've seen pickup lines from time to time, I have very little first-hand experience with them. So my brain reacts to the image:
- Is this image a realistic representation?
- If it is, I have no first-hand knowledge to verify it
- If it's not, I have no way to know without going and looking for images myself
- If it is, it's undermining the content by representing something real with something fake
Artwork/illustrations/visualizations are often critical when communicating via text. But I think that when someone is writing about a factual matter - a real phenomenon that is occurring regularly - using fake imagery is just the wrong choice.
> If the child is not in any actual danger, then people who call emergency services or police need to be cited for wasting resources.
As a mandatory reporter, my instructions are if there is any possibility report and let the experts figure it out. There is no harm to me if I report and nothing is found. However if they discover something and find that I was in contact with the kid in question they will investigate: if there is anything that I should have seen I'll be arrested for not reporting it.
I appreciate that mandatory reporting laws exist for evidence of abuse, and to an extent, suspicion of abuse; but does your training say that children left alone less than a few hours, is abuse or is suspicious by itself, and needs to be reported?
There is always the possibility for anything, so that cannot be the bar.
My training is if there is any possibility of anything report. They specifically told me not to think. Telling me a few hours is okay would mean I now have something to think about and I'm not allowed to do think.
How do I report you for taking the time to reply here instead of reporting that Amy, Brad, Charlie, Drake, Emily, everyone, etc.. parents all have the possibility of abusing them, that their siblings all have the possibility of abusing them, that their friends all have the possibility of abusing them, that their teachers all have the possibility abusing them, that you could be a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning and not remember that you could also be abusing them, that the police have the possibility of abusing them, that secret agents could be sneaking into their house at night and abusing them.
If that was your instructions, then your full-time job should be making reports and nothing else.
See how absurd your instructions were, or what you think your instructions were?
Unfortunately bad instructions and no one getting those instructions changed, helps lead to this nonsense that we hear about in the news, and the thousand (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) cases that are just as bad but not as newsworthy.
> It’s not just a message to parents, it’s the broader society.[...] A mom was recently arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk into town. These types of incidents only fuel the school car pickup culture
If you let your kid out roaming, walking home from school, and the child causes a minor issue, you get the wrath of "Why aren't you watching your kid?"???
So we've developed this culture around ensuring that the child is accounted for at all hours of the day. Drop off, pickup from school, included.
The bar chart is pretty funny. "Over 3 miles" is the highest bucket? That's supposed to be far?
I went to school in a semi-rural school district, one of the largest in the state by area. I just checked Google Maps and the high school is 13 miles away, 16 minutes by car (much of it highway), and maybe a half hour by school bus if I remember correctly. It could be a bit tedious, but it wasn't a terrible commute by any means.
> Parents are not simply choosing to drive their children to school because it’s fun to sit in a long line. It is becoming more of a necessity because schools are more spread out than before, or at least families are living further from their schools.
Necessity? I don't see what's wrong with school buses. They're just about the only practical form of mass transit in rural areas. They work for all ages, in any weather where the school is open at all.
> The bar chart is pretty funny. "Over 3 miles" is the highest bucket? That's supposed to be far?
The buckets were chosen because 3 miles is farther than you'd reasonably expect kids to be able to walk to and from school every day. They say this right under the chart.
It's not helpful to do chest-thumping to compare whose farthest away from school when the entire point of the section is that 80% of people fall into that bucket.
> Necessity? I don't see what's wrong with school buses. They're just about the only practical form of mass transit in rural areas.
Again, you've missed the point of the article. In cities, students are spread out in all directions. It's not feasible for a bus to loop around an entire city to pick everyone up when they're spread all over.
Why is it expected that kids should be able to walk to school? Seems like that’s a pretty blinkered view by someone who never leaves the city? In a rural district, very few kids can do that, and that’s why there are buses for everyone else.
Also, why wouldn’t school buses work in a denser area? That’s why they have multiple school buses doing multiple routes.
All the usual arguments for mass transit should apply for school buses, too. Density should make providing bus service easier, not harder.
> Why is it expected that kids should be able to walk to school?
Because we typically don't let kids drive. If they're able to walk to school then they can walk themselves to and from school without the help of an adult (even one driving the bus), once they are responsible enough to.
My kids' school used to let parents into the yard during dropoff and pickup. It was wonderful: a time for the kids to play with their friends and the parents to mingle and catch up. Now we have the car dropoff/pickup line. I'm for "everyone park and walk your kid into school" or "let kids go home by themselves if it's safe to do so" [0]. The car pickup and dropoff is the absolute worst.
[0] Our current bike route from home to school isn't optimal -- too many busy streets where drivers routinely run reds. That's a rant for another day...
> The classic yellow school bus is a national icon.
It is, but like the pickup line, it’s also a national embarrassment. Half the buses in my town are ancient and belch black smoke like a semi rolling coal.
The article makes a lot of great points, but looks to miss that kids are enrolled in a lot of after school activities these days.
I was never enrolled in any as a kid and never really expected for my kid to be, because I thought parents were the motivating factor for kids to get into a bunch of activities, but IME they aren't. My kid loves her activities and picking her up to shuttle her directly to it is a lot quicker than using a bus or walking.
I was driven to school during preschool, kindergarten, and part of grade school, biked or walked in junior high or high school. My kid is in preschool and I drive him or walk him to school. He'll be able to walk to junior high and high school, and will probably take the bus to grade school. I don't mind the pickup line right now.
>California has fewer school buses than in other parts of the country. A survey conducted by the Federal Highway Administration found that nationally, almost 40% of school-aged kids ride a school bus. In California, that number is only 8%.
>Like so many questions related to school funding and services, the answer to Winters’ question has roots in the passage of Proposition 13
I think people would be surprised that there's school districts where the median home value is $1.5M, but the district can't afford any school bus service except for federally mandated school buses for special ed kids.
Our infrastructure in general is a national embarrassment. I'm more pessimistic on this category than anything else. The best possible future I can imagine in the USA, transportation-wise, is not having to hold the steering wheel during a robo traffic jam.
It’s awful. Big long line where I live and it used to be handled by one school bus and kids walking home. Imagine the waste of human productive time, fuel, etc. I’m always astounded this many people don’t have a job to be at at 3pm.
I live in a relatively residential neighborhood in NYC next to a school (outside of the congestion zone). The morning dropoffs and afternoon pickups are insane. It literally causes a gridlock for a couple hours in a part of the neighborhood that has like 4 intersections. Somehow we have to get back to the days when parents trusted the community that their kid is going to get home safe, otherwise this nonsense is never going to end.
At the core this behavior is simply a version of social proof. Parents see what other parents do and/or kids see friends being picked up and then put pressure on their parents to do the same. Then it gets to a tipping point where it just becomes the thing that you do (and nobody thinks otherwise or wants to tell their kids they won't do this or questions it).
It's also a way for a parent to think somehow they are doing the right thing and get a little enjoyment in their head (despite the time involved or wasted) 'I am a good parent'. Doesn't involve as much effort as other things a parent does (or should do) it's simple (other than the time).
The weirdest part of my school day was wandering out of the recess lot and trying to find Mom’s car every day. A lot of my classmates were bused in from 15 miles away and we were second-class “townies” but yet, we lived outside the parochial territory. Fifth Estate, I suppose.
Once Dad bought a new car and surprised us by not picking us up in the one we recognized?!
Around 5th grade I had some sort of trauma-drama on the soccer field, needed to call in Mom for a pickup. I didn’t know what a busy-tone sounded like despite figuring out the payphone on campus. I held the receiver to my ear for 10 minutes anxiously hoping Mom would answer.
I believe the rare school bus rides were field trips, and once my friend and I were in the rear, frantically waving and smiling at every other motorist to see how they’d respond, and we failed to cause any accidents
I feel it was a curse on Mom to put so many miles on Soccer Mom Car. Parents couldn’t hardly wait for our maturity and licensing!
Gigantic tank-like vehicles with worse line of sight then actual tanks, insane levels of crime that are rampant all over the US compared to Japan, etc.
Make tank-like trucks and SUVs illegal to manufacturer is a good start. It's going to be tough to compete with homogenous first-world countries on culture and crime.
Fortunately, there's homeschool. In the amount of time it takes someone to load up the kids into the car, drive to school, wait in these long lines, and then do the reverse, that should be enough instructor-led time for an entire homeschooling curriculum.
The best part is, you won't have to subject your children to marxists and people that look like literal clowns that fell face-first into a tackle box.
We can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm. We'll look back on the primitive times when kids couldn't just click a button or whisper an instruction for a ride like anyone else.
500 manually driven cars and 500 robocars take the same space. Building schools, cities, and communities in the US that are pedestrian based is the only real solution. The author summarizes as "We need to thicken up our places, slow down cars, and install pedestrian or biking infrastructure" which I couldn't agree with more.
> can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm
I live in a well-to-do community where many kids are chauffeured to school. The problem isn't just the parents' wasted time. It's the congestion and lack of agency this behaviour bestows on children. Head to head, I'd bet the kid who can navigate themselves to and from school outcompetes the one chauffered in a robotaxi in novel environments.
I used to be in this camp, but when it comes down to it busses, trains, and other shared transportation options are both the past and the future. Kids from all economic backgrounds can use them at once, they are extremely space and energy efficient, and the necessity of walking the final leg to the central access point is healthier for our bodies and our communities.
I'm not in disagreement, robot cars would be awesome, but why do we need scifi technology here in the usa to solve something that is already a solved problem the world over.
It really is a mental problem more than anything else. The inability to imagine a virtuous public realm welcoming to children, conjure its value in one's mind eye, and commit to the necessary material changes.
Busses are slow as snot in many cases, because the routes are insane.
We can walk to school and see the bus when we leave the house and easily beat it by many minutes.
(Busses being slow and routes taking long is probably a design feature, allowing schools to let out at 3PM but parents to not have to be home until 5PM or later).
But the real final solution won't be robocars, it'll be robokids. Then if you lose one you can just get a replacement.
Well that headline sums it up. After 10 years of dealing with it and wondering "how the f did we get to this point", it's satisfying to hear it called what it is.
A small win in our family was in my son's final year of elementary school when he finally decided to try walking home 1.5 miles; that Spring was a delight for him. He was properly decompressed and had logged a minimum amount of physical activity for good sleep and all the rest.
Pay for the buses! Build the greenways! Normalize walking! And stop worrying about abductions for the love of gawd!
Everyone here should watch the Japanese TV series, Old Enough!. 2-4 year olds are sent out on their own to run errands, etc. Yes, really, 2-4 years old. And they succeed and are fine.
https://www.ntv.co.jp/english/pc/2011/02/old-enough.html
That wouldn't work in US until the whole culture changes. An individual family may do this, and then someone will call child protective services because there is a lost, unaccompanied child.
Happened to my coworker: kids were playing outside and a neighbor called the authorities on them. Not clear if they really thought the kids were in danger, or just did it out of spite, but what ensued was a nightmare of CPS calling the workplace and a few follow-up house visits. The sad part is everyone involved can turn around and claim "we were worried about the children" and use that as a shield for whatever overzealousness or maliciousness may hide underneath.
>That wouldn't work in US until the whole culture changes.
This is one of those things laws are great at. Delete the power of idiot Karens and the culture will return to normal.
It works for Utah (and to a point, Texas); it can work for your polity, too.
When children are at far greater risk of abuse and abduction by concern trolls and the State, and they very much are in New World countries, your society is broken.
> children are at far greater risk of abuse and abduction by concern trolls and the State
Is there evidence of that? And would you define 'concern trolls' (beyond 'people who have concerns different than mine')?
>people who have concerns different than mine
"Trying to abduct my child either directly or by proxy" is not merely a question of polite differing concerns.
Who is trying to do that?
> This is one of those things laws are great at. Delete the power of idiot Karens and the culture will return to normal.
How? Those idiot Karens are the ones writing the laws. They get on your state legislature and local town ordinances, and prevent more housing from being built too.
They have no competence and they do everything in the name of "safety", so you can't challenge them with logic or reason.
They are usually very privileged people with plenty of time on their hands so you can't play asymmetric warfare with them and expect to win.
That does not mean attempts to defeat them should not be made. Sometimes they even succeed.
Karen delenda est.
Nice. What laws are you referring to?
"Free range" laws. You search those terms and find a ton of information including which states have them.
> The sad part is everyone involved can turn around and claim
As a mandatory reporter if I don't report such a thing I can be put in prison. Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters (only mandatory reporters are allowed to go camping with scouts). I'm specifically told not to think, if there is any possibility I must report it and let the experts figure out if there is a problem or not.
This of course means the experts have to spend a lot of time/effort investigating where it is obvious there is nothing but they have to get enough evidence of that to close the case. This time is taken away from all the kids that really need help. Note that I have no idea how many kids who need help are discovered this way.
> As a mandatory reporter if I don't report such a thing I can be put in prison. Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters (only mandatory reporters are allowed to go camping with scouts). I'm specifically told not to think, if there is any possibility I must report it and let the experts figure out if there is a problem or not.
There are some issues here with what you're saying.
Mandatory reporter classifications are a legal construct. Activities can't make people into mandatory reporters. Only some mandated reporters are subject to reporting requirements when off-duty (for example, in many jurisdictions, your scout camp 'chaperones' may well not be obliged to mandatory report. Teachers and HCPs may, however, be. And it may vary for WHAT they are reporting.)
> Activities can't make people into mandatory reporters. Only some mandated reporters are subject to reporting requirements when off-duty
What is all that based on? Are you a mandatory reporter?
It might be dangerous to give advice. Even if you know your jurisdiction, others will vary.
I am a mandatory reporter (healthcare provider), and I specifically called out that jurisdictions, occupations, and events or situations may tweak that.
> Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters
I was specifically commenting that an activity doesn't make someone a mandatory reporter. That is you are a mandatory reporter based on your occupation, status, and what is happening. The OPs comment makes it sound like "if you're camping overnight with children, you become a mandatory reporter"
versus, for example, "The BSA's policy is to only allow people who are already designated mandatory reporters to chaperone camping overnight with scouts". The BSA cannot ... mandate ... that you are a mandatory reporter (in the legal sense, with protections and responsibilities accompanying) just by virtue of you saying "I'll chaperone this event" (though they can certainly say "it is our policy that you act as-if").
Their policy is probably only act as if. The training I'm given doesn't go into such details though.
Come to think of it, they say it is mandatory to report, but are careful to avoid talking about the law. However it is recorded I have training. I would honestly expect the courts decide that I'm legally a mandatory reporter if it was discovered I should have seen something, even if I don't technically meet the law. (at least if they can find any way to read the law to get me)
That makes absolute sense. And I think it's quite deliberate to not talk about the law. And I have no objections to a policy that 'we expect you to report concerning things' and disqualifying you if they learned you didn't.
All of this is of course on top of any moral or ethical imperatives about reporting suspected abuse, mandated or otherwise.
>kids were playing outside and a neighbor called the authorities on them
The worst part is that someone would thing this is the appropriate thing to do rather than observe the kids and in any case approach them and ask if they’re OK. The US has grown a culture of “don’t get involved” cowards hidden behind the legal system.
The coworker never found out who that was and talking about he kind of suspected it was a just a neighbor that didn't like them. And like you said, they can always hide behind "I don't know I was just worried about the children".
I understand that’s terrifying in the moment to have CPS at your door, but maybe the erroneous CPS visit is a one time cost we have to pay to change the culture, until CPS learns to ignore phone calls with no more details other than “children are outside”. If they don’t learn to ignore them - that sounds like lawsuit territory
Change requires someone that doesn’t accept the status quo
(I don’t have kids, but hope to have some in the future, so this is me talking out of turn)
> If they don’t learn to ignore them - that sounds like lawsuit territory
It's the reverse. CPS could be found liable if they ignored a report where there were indeed problems.
Also, I have family that work in CPS and it's really not the bad guy everyone that's "anti-CPS" seems to think. They have a HIGH bar to go over before they'll remove kids from a home. Things have to be particularly bad. And even then, the organization is slanted to get the kids back into the home ASAP. The state doesn't want to have to take care of kids.
Most of the time, it's work with the parents to make the environment safe.
I really dislike it when Japan is brought up as a comparison with the US, especially when it comes to crime or schooling. The cultures, poverty levels, and crime rates are so vastly different that it's never helpful.
Maybe they are so different because you (and others) won't try to learn from different cultures. If not, probably nothing will change.
What exactly are you suggesting?
Japan is a monoculture and strictly traditional, not to mention very xenophobic. Everything works because the social penalties for violating those norms are severe. It’s effectively an ethnostate and not that long ago revered their god-emperor.
The U.S. is by contrast a diverse (geographically and demographically), broad culture of immigrant communities based on a concept of rugged individualism where states and townships run things as they see fit.
If you want to reshape the U.S. in the model of Japan … well
> What exactly are you suggesting?
Not to reshape America into Japan, but attempt to keep the parts that are nice while integrating the best parts of other nations. America loved to claim it was a nation of immigrants; the French even sent you a gift for how much America would take the best of other countries (the brightest minds, the hardest workers), and build with that.
Maybe that's not how the country works any more, but it was a nice fantasy.
America has an obsession with being different and has a thousand answers to why things that work elsewhere would not and could not possibly work here. It's the size, if it's not the size, it's the density, if it's not the density it's ... repeat ad nauseam.
There is much to learn from them. However there are dark sides of their culture too. They have high suicide rates, and are very xenophobic (much worse than Trump in the US) for starters. We can learn, but be careful as it isn't always clear which factors you want to emulate are tied to things you don't.
As of 2019, Japan's suicide rate is lower than the US.
It is if you consider cultures, poverty levels, and crime rates to not be immutable geographic traits, but a result of policy choices. The US can't take a giant leap to kids having Tokyo-like freedom, but it can look at what Japan does differently that results in such a society (eg. its public education system, public transit, policing, street design, typical vehicle size, etc).
You cannot legislate positive cultural attributes into being. There's no way to fine people into reading to their kids, picking up trash when they see it, deciding to put the grocery cart back, prioritizing academic achievement, etc.
It takes a lot more than legislation, but Japan's modern culture is in large part the product of its education system. It has a strong focus on teaching exactly that sort of prosocial behaviour.
Even then, Japan’s homogeneity allows its government to teach a certain lifestyle to kids with no backlash. That’s unworkable here in the US.
It's taught in the home too and Americans will teach children how to use welfare before throwing away their own trash
This is a reality TV show. They have a full crew following the kids around.
Like any reality TV, you're only seeing the story they want you to see.
Nobody should be gauging reality based on what you see on reality TV shows.
Sure, but if you spend time in Japan you really will see five-year-old kids walking long distances and taking transit to school and running errands unaccompanied.
Agreed, I saw it firsthand while I was there. The elementary school was near the train station I had to take to get to university, and there was always a line of little kids walking themselves there every morning.
The crew is often in disguise, and the kids have no idea who they are. At 3, do you know what a cameraperson is?
Edit: Occasional parts of the show are the camera people trying to avoid the kid who has turned and is walking right toward them.
In grad school, a friend from China explained that he stayed home on his own starting at like age 3. He was going down to the market outside his high rise apartment, buying basic groceries, and entertaining himself all day. It blew my mind, he saw nothing wrong with it.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's actually impressive that you can entertain yourself at 3-4 years old.
My perception of time at that age would have been such that I'd probably be very fearful of being abandoned if left alone for more than 2-3 hours.
But kudos to him.
That’s quite a tale you were told. As a parent I can tell you my children barely even remember being 3yo, let alone have the ability to reach the shelves and pour their own beverages at that age
As a HN denizen, I can tell you that your anecdote does not overide someone else's anecdote.
It is importamt to understand the whole cultural picture of this practice:
1. Neighbors and friends are notified in advance. "If you see my daughter and she looks lost, please help her, she is doing an errand."
2. The destination is usually notified. "My daughter is coming to buy rice, let me know if she isnt there in two hours."
3. This practice is somewhat old-fashioned and rural. Many parents wouldnt consider it today.
Remember, the show was aired to a Japanese audience. If it were universal, it would not be worth televising.
Have you seen the show? It's often (usually?) filmed in towns, and I don't recall adults often being notified.
> And they succeed and are fine.
They also literally had a camera and crew on standby while also blocking off streets (off screen).
I don't know what you read, but there are plenty of scenes of the kids crossing streets that have traffic.
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The exact same people calling CPS on kids walking down the street claiming it's too dangerous are the people who advocate for turning communities into low-trust economic zones.
The reason it's more dangerous now is because of them. They privatized profit (in this case, the warm fuzzies of addicts shooting up on playgrounds) and socialized risk.
That is pollution. We should clean up that pollution, and ban those who created it from causing more.
Ngl if the price for that is a Japanese level of social control, conformity, and their mad justice system... I'll take a car line.
> I'll take a car line
Push this out thirty years. One set of kids was navigating the real world since they were 4. The other has been mollycoddled with overparenting and screen time. Which cohort do you think will be happier, better adjusted and better off?
Then realise that it's not uncommon to see grade schoolers taking the subway to and from school in New York.
> Which cohort do you think will be happier, better adjusted and better off?
Yes, and have agency and think for themselves - a key requirement of democracy and freedom.
Consider that the fact that there’s a tv show about it means it’s a novelty in Japan as well.
It’s great that Japan has a civil society that makes a show like that possible, but don’t mistake it for more than it is. It’s the same mistake as generalizing from what you read in the news: it’s news because it’s unusual.
The novelty is that the show has 3 year olds being independent. In Japan 5 year olds doing independent tasks is common and expected.
No, it really is commonplace in Japan. It makes good TV because little kids are cute as heck. Not everybody has kids, and even if you do, they don't remain five years old forever. So even mundane stories about little kids can stay popular.
There's more to growing up and being "well adjusted" than walking around as a child, for example the freedom to explore who you are without the "nail that sticks up is hammered down" treatment. I also enjoy a certain amount of diversity (in every sense, from thought to people) that simply isn't tolerated in Japan.
> more to growing up and being "well adjusted" than walking around as a child
Sure. Which of those cohorts do you think has more freedom?
> also enjoy a certain amount of diversity (in every sense, from thought to people) that simply isn't tolerated in Japan
You’d have a point if Japan were the only culture in the world with competent 4-year olds. They’re not. We’re the exception. To the extent there is a bubble it’s the American culture of isolating and surveilling kids to and from school.
Forget Japan for a moment. Walking to and from school unattended is perfectly normal in many countries in the EU. The normalisation of car journeys in the US is bizarre .
There is no "US" where something like this is normalized, it's down to region, weather, urbanization and perception of safety. I grew up walking and biking to school because I was lucky enough to live in a nice suburb close to my school. For people who need to take a 20 minute *drive* to school obviously that isn't feasible.
The US is a massive country with a huge number of different climates and layouts, which is partly what makes articles and conversations like this so painful to read. Instead of the skeptical, critical thinking you'd expect from HN you get mess of "Car bad" "I wish we had European public transit" and broad generalization talk.
> I grew up walking and biking to school because I was lucky enough to live in a nice suburb close to my school
So did I. Have you been back? The kids in my school are dropped off when I biked.
Yeah, they're still walking/biking. I live in a state where I see kids walking to and from school all of the time.
They also did an "Old Enough Canada":
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgBne2KTlDUyxLPg3oalg...
We can have a walkable community and still have things we love and do.
Don’t worry you’ll get the control and the car line soon enough
When they started the pickup lines, I started just parking about half a mile away from the school. He knew exactly where I would be and we completely avoided the traffic and insanity of that nonsense.
We live about a mile from his current school, so he rides his bike whenever the weather permits. He's always in a good mood when he gets home.
I think it's funny that when he gets older, he'll be able to say that it was uphill both ways since we have a sizeable hill between home and school.
My kids having been cycling a mile each way to school since they were 5 years old. It's definitely doable, although we're fortunate enough that we aren't both working long days, and are well off enough that school is that close.
A mile is not close. Disclaimer: I am european. Grew up in ireland. Lots of cars, but unless you're in the countryside or its raining, it's generally walk/cycle to school. In Stockholm now, you are 'shamed' if you drive to school to drop your kids off. "Normal" parents have cargo bikes to bring their small kids to school if it's a long distance (like 500m or more).
You must have a lot of schools. I walked or biked about a mile each way to school starting in third grade (age 8-9), and the only reason I didn't do it a year earlier was that the two other kids who would accompany me were a year younger.
I only got dropped off if it was raining (that can be quite severe and thunderstorms are common) or if I was so late that I couldn't make it. In the latter case, I walked home.
Four years later, my school was miles away. No choice but dropoff lines (private school, no bus service). Had I been in the public school system, I would have needed to bus or be dropped off for junior high (that year and two after it, ~4 mi/6.5 km away traveling on and crossing multiple arterial roads without bike lanes or sidewalks for most of the way), but could have walked/ridden/driven myself to high school.
Housing in Europe is very different from what it is in the US.
A lot of it will look something like this [1].
In England, it's actually somewhat unusual to have any space between two homes. Semi and fully detached homes command a fairly high price.
Roads were also not built for cars, so they tend to be much narrower than what you'd find in the US. All that means you'll find a much higher population density. You can even find a bunch of cobblestone roads without much effort.
I'd also say that cities are FAR more walkable than they are in the US. It's almost the reverse of what it is here, it can be easier to walk to the store than drive simply because there's a billion little pathways that lead everywhere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraced_houses_in_the_United_...
I've traveled enough in Europe, and not just major cities, to understand this about housing.
However, what is the average size of a graduating class from secondary education? My high school class was quite small, just under 100, but it was an oddity and classes before and since were more like 120-150. Even in elementary school we had around 75 in each year. It is not unusual in larger metro areas in the US to have over 1000 students in each graduating class.
Typical (nice) appartment housing in Stockholm
https://whitearkitekter.com/news/kvarter-7-the-starting-poin...
Ironically, i rode a rented electric scooter over hundreds of year old cobbles yesterday - needed to make a meeting on time. New meets old.
Stockholm is a high density urban environment. Appartment living. 4-6 floor high buildings is the norm. Schools every mile or so would be my guess. Ours is like 300m away. Next closest is 1km and 1.5km. Quite normal, i speculate.
> After 10 years of dealing with it and wondering "how the f did we get to this point"
While it's a lot of parental idiocy, please do consider that lack of enforcement action around bullying is also part of the answer.
I mean, walkability is a big problem for me. My kid would have to cross multiple busy streets in order to get to school (which is ~3 miles away). We don't have crossing guards either, the only ones we do have are literally at the school property.
"he decided" is probably one of the issues here. back in the day it would have been "this is what your doing now kid"
There's a difference when everyone is walking home (so you often walk home with a few friends who live nearby) vs being alone walking home.
His choices were bus or walk (my experiences in the car lines are from days when kids needed to picked up for an occasion) before you jump to too many conclusions.
You're right. We would have been mocked "It's a mile and a half, I'm not picking you up when you have two perfectly good legs."
That kind of upbringing worked out really well for the boomers, we are in this mess because of that. Kids should have agency and independence, but also a feeling of safety, trust, and security. You cannot force a kid to work against their own safety instinct because of your own selfish comfort.
“but also a feeling of safety, trust, and security”
i agree a little bit. But at what point does the “growing up” part happen? you know…when they turn 18, and have to get a real job (or go to university), doing things that are uncomfortable and maybe not fun?
The process of growing up and becoming more mature is accomplished by challenging yourself and pushing boundaries, to grow as a person.
i guess im saying, it depends. its not as black and white as you suggest. Is the fear irrational? Maybe therapy would help. Or a buddy to walk home with. But you need to _somehow_ help kids grow independent.
Parenting isn’t just about defending your kid’s boundaries on their behalf. It’s also helping your kid to grow and expand those boundaries, and giving them the skills to manage them independently.
The end goal is to create a happy, fully functioning adult.
Their safety instinct is wrong. You have to work them through it
Providing a feeling of "safety, trust, and security" contradicts "Kids should have agency and independence." The only way they have safety is if you are with them 100% of the time which means 0 independence. I'm not worried about kids because they will natuarally avoid danger. I'm more worried about adults causing harm to kids (America).
> You cannot force a kid to work against their own safety instinct because of your own selfish comfort.
I got this kind of reaction from my son for all kinds of things I made him do by himself that made him uncomfortable. Now that he's 18, he thanks me for it and wonders why all his friends are so entirely unable to do almost anything out in public without help.
Wtf
Every generation grows and becomes better than the last*.
/me says "ok boomer" in gen-z
* Certain exclusions may apply
I think this article misses the one big problem (as I understand it). It's that schools need to dismiss the kid to their parent. I have family in North Carolina and I understand that cars have the family number displayed, and someone with a radio communicates to the school staff "Car 315 is here", they then find that kid and dismiss them. Just do away with that. When the bell rings, send the kids outside and they will just find their parent. That's how my kids school works and there is no traffic jam.
Just letting the kids out en mass is how my son's school worked until Covid. Then they went to the call out the car as it arrives system as you describe, and they never went back. It is so much worse. Thankfully, my son drives himself to school now so I don't have to deal with it any longer.
Yeah, this seems like a pretty surprising omission from the article. In particular, it stuck out to me at this point:
> In fact, in 2022 only about 28% of US students used the school bus to get to school.1 Using the school bus is trending down, as shown in Chart I. In 1969, about 38% of students used the bus, similar to 2009 with 37.5%, and further dropping in 2017 to 36.5%.
In other words, for nearly half a century, the percentage of students taking the bus only fell by 1.5%, and then five years after that, it fell by an additional 8.5%. It _might_ not be covid, but clearly something became a factor between 2017 and 2022 that wasn't at least as far back to 1969, and I feel like it's the obvious hypothesis that would need to be addressed first.
I've never heard of this call-out system. It sounds like how you'd run a prison Our schools just open the doors and the kids run to the cars.
The call-out has been around at least since the early '00s.
Just like all security theater, it's easy enough to get around. All you need is the same looking card and the identifier. Most of the time, that's just the kid's name on the card. Some color code the card by class grade as well.
I know this as I was helping a friend scoop their kiddos up from school, and they just sent me to the school with the card. Nobody questioned who I was. They just saw the card, radioed the name, and the kiddos were waiting at the curb when I eventually crawled up to the spot. Since the kiddos expected me, there was no "who is that guy" situation. Otherwise, just fake a card and get a prize is how lame this setup is
The pre-school my youngest has this. The middle school my oldest goes to is much more relaxed. I'm fine with treating my 4 year old like she can't be trusted to run around alone, but my 11 year old can.
What I'm not fine with is there is no bus service for the 4 year old, we have to drive her (I bike, but it isn't a great route - we have to cross a busy 4 lane)
>Just letting the kids out en mass is how my son's school worked until Covid.
My kids school worked like that and it was still a mess, primarily because the parents were too stupid to follow the rules as to how to park their cars. I was set up so that everyone parked in parallel rows ||||| but the ones on the right were closest to the exit, so a bunch of people would pull into those rows to the point that they'd wrap around behind the other rows ___| and prevent people from getting into those rows. It was stupid and the school would send out notices and have employees walk down to the end of the row and tell people to move to the next one but it never stayed fixed.
> because the parents were too stupid
This sums up all of the school pickup problems I see and/or deal with daily.
I also see many parents making dangerous decisions, most of which fit into the “I’ll go now” category, including accelerating quickly to get to the crosswalk before the kids crossing the street do. Just this school year, I’ve seen multiple near misses, with kids jumping back onto the sidewalk to avoid being hit by a parent who just picked up their own kid.
The traffic is caused by vehicles queuing up in line, period.
The system you describe isn't necessary to cause the traffic. It's not the root cause.
If kids have to be released to their parents and are no longer turned out en masse like they used to be, that will absolutely cause traffic and could very well be the root cause of traffic that exceeds the designed capacity of the school pickup circles.
When I was growing up kids within a mile of the school would walk themselves to school and back home with very few exceptions, often starting with first graders. But even a half mile is a long enough distance that many busy parents in the suburbs would choose to drive it rather than walk it four times a day.
I’m across the street from a school and there is always one parent that parks in my condo building’s driveway and blocks it. It would be too much for them to be in the line!
Then sometimes, they leave their car and go in the school and we are trying to home or leave and they get angry with us!
Yeah, you can see a lot of creativity depending on what's available. Where I once lived in Houston, parents would park at a nearby strip center and huddle around the school exit. And then walk their kid across the 6-lane road (3 lanes in each direction) that Houston is obsessed with building back to where they parked their car.
This sort of thing drives me insane. The people on the polar extremes are (I suspect) part of why we can't have nice things. I've both lived by the school and been a parent, and I badly wish people would practice some empathy and common sense. For example there are some people that will literally sit outside during pickup hours on a lawn chair and yell at people for parking on the street in front of their house (which, btw, is completely legal and there's nowhere else to park within several miles of the school). I've also seen parents park right in front of driveways, blocking people's access to their homes, which is absolutely not ok. It kills me that we can't just have a simple compromise.
Parents: It's never ok to block somebody's driveway! Residents: It's not illegal for people to park on the street in front of your house (assuming they aren't blocking your access of course)
I live near a school. Soccer practice, parents routinely park up and down the street at the far end of the field where their kids are practicing, because the school car park at the other end of the field would be a good two minute walk away. "No parking this side" doesn't apply to soccer practice parking, either, apparently.
And if you want to just do a drive by pickup, sure, no worries, stop in the middle of the street (with cars either side), and have your kids younger sister hop out, leaving the car door open, and go wander down the slope to help her brother with his equipment and carry it back up the slope. No-one else is using the street or lives there, after all, so they can wait a few minutes. Bonus points if you get belligerent with them or flip them off for being "impatient".
If children can't leave without their parent, then they can't walk home, or bike, or take a bus.
That's a lame take from this. Kids/parents fill out forms that state the typical way the students arrive/depart the school. If they are on a bus route, those kids exit the school from a different exit (side/rear of building) so that the buses queuing up do not interfere with the car queue. Walkers typically exit yet a different set of doors.
The parents that arrive early but have kids that are not ready to be picked up is precisely why the queues get out of control. At least with this method the cars are moved along much faster. If a car arrives in the queue but the kiddo is not yet found, when the car reaches the front it is asked to move to a holding spot out of the queue--much like fast food places do when your order is going to hold up everyone else in line.
But it does cause it because every car needs to get checked off. When I was a kid in the 80s, there were still quite a few kids that got picked up, but no one was picking them up from the door. They'd park somewhere around the school within a block or two.
I dunno... I grew up in the 80s/90s and most of us took the bus or walked if we lived within a mile or so. A parent drop-off/pick-up was the exception - going to a doctor appointment after school or something.
My school said you must be at least 2 miles away before they would route buses for pickups. There were exceptions which my neighborhood qualified as there were no sidewalks, and we would have to cross a single lane bridge to cross a 50 foot creek with no pedestrian path. I lived in the boonies, and it was faster for me to cut through cow pastures in a straight line than walking the roads. We just had to make sure the rancher's bull was not going to notice us (or sneakily hang a red handkerchief on one of your buddies' backpack).
And the vehicles are limited by the roads that are available to line up on.
And the roads are limited by the school's ability to acquire land.
And no reasonable school is ever going to set aside any more land for a car line than is absolutely necessary that could otherwise be used to provide more school building/field.
That, and just let kids walk home. It's good for their muscles.
Many of them can't walk home from school. As the article says, most students now live too far away from school (greater than three miles), and many rural/suburban areas have underdeveloped sidewalks and traffic systems.
If three miles sounds like not a big deal, it certainly is when you have short legs, a backpack full of books, and uncooperative weather. I was lucky enough to walk to/from school for most of my schooling. It was only around one mile and it still took 30 minutes. As an adult I would probably balk at a 90-minute commute.
Indeed. My kid could theoretically walk to/from school, but they carry a musical instrument every day along with a backpack full of all of their books. The school doesn't offer lockers anymore because they deemed it "unsafe", so all books and a big Chromebook need to come home each day (and be carried between every class).
I played the trombone in sixth grade. Your kid will be fine carrying anything short of a baritone by that age. It sucks to carry. Switch hands as necessary. Be selective with your books on instrument days. But he or she can manage.
lockers are unsafe? wtf terrible school system is this?
One that has to deal with parents either explicitly buying a handgun for their kids or leaving handguns in easily accessible locations.
Where I live all schools must provide bus service for kids more than 1 mile away, or if the route to school crosses a busy road. Some kids to get a city bus pass, but the yellow school bus is common. I know other states do it differently.
Yes, adults walk ~2 miles/hr. 1.5 hours is too long. But there are bicycles which go ~5 times as fast. Now it's a 15-20 minute trip.
Then have them walk a few blocks to where their parent is parked. There's no reason to have a line of cars idling.
Literally addressed in the article.
80% of kids live too far away for walking to be feasible.
And yet less 40% of students who live within a mile of school walk regularly. For kids who live <.25 miles, that number is still <50%. Walking a quarter of a mile takes ~5 minutes, maybe a bit longer for a small kid with a large school pack.
Many should be able to walk almost as fast as loading up the car, waiting in the queue, etc.
Would be much more efficient to assign numbers to the child abductors instead, assuming that they are less numerous than the legitimate families.
some (most?) times the abductor is legitimate family
Just give the abductors an NFT that represents the child.
> It's that schools need to dismiss the kid to their parent.
Do they? What's the citation for that law? Who are the schools dismissing the kids to when they walk home by themselves?
The parent has already signed a release form at the beginning of the school year that designated their kiddo as a walker, and did not need the parent present. Just like your DoorDash option to not be needed to be present
That's still a huge step back from previous generations, where all kids were expected to find their own way to their parents, whether waiting at home, waiting in the pickup loop, or waiting a few blocks away where it's not as busy.
Maybe you're misremembering some of the details of being a kid, but I know my parents signed forms that told the school that I would be walking to/from school. That was in the early 80s.
Do you have any memory of any kids being held in place until someone came to pick them up after 2nd grade?
I never experience being picked up after school by a parent. Both of my parents worked, so I rode the bus or walked.
What exactly is your problem here though? The fact that kids are kept in a staging area so they are not congregating in the same space that kids that are actively being placed into cars? That's an issue? You'd rather have that area congested with kids not paying attention doing kid things with their friends after school?
one abduction and one lawsuit will put an end to release forms real quick
Just like Columbine stopped all future school shootings?
and yet, 40+ years later, we still have them
> schools need to dismiss the kid to their parent
Schools (EDIT: feel the) need to dismiss the kid to someone. That could be another parent, in the case of carpooling. It could be a bus driver. The root problem is parents chauffering their kids to and from school.
> Schools need to dismiss the kid to someone
"Back in my day" the bell went and we walked out the gate and went home.
Sure, yes, didn't mean to imply schools have to do this. Just that a school can satisfy its need to look paranoid while sidestepping the problems cited in the article. The root problem isn't the schools' paranoia. It's the lack of a solid bus system.
> Schools need to dismiss the kid to someone.
Do they? What's the citation for that law? Who are the schools dismissing the kids to when they walk home by themselves?
Certainly, at a certain age they do. I remember picking up very young cousins. But after a certain age, parents should be able to write a permission slip that allows them to walk home. Just because radio communcation is used does not do away with traffic jams. You're still driving, you're still lining up, and there are still a ton of cars which is what the article was talking about.
For what age? That's similar to what our school has for kindergarten. But if they did that all the way up to grade 6 it would be a giant mess.
Agreed. We don’t have much of a car line since it’s a walk-to-school neighborhood (90% walk). Still, k-2 are dismissed to parents. Once 3rd grade hits it’s open.
Seems like a fine balance to me.
Yet that are kids that walk at most schools because they live across the street. Or at least there used to be. And how does that work for a high school that has the same ridiculous lines? 15 year olds know which car takes them home, and sometimes they're riding with peers?
That's fucking ridiculous.
Normally I’d ding a comment like this as low-effort, but… I honestly can’t think of any more appropriate reaction.
I know I’m behind the times, but I was surprised recently when, at an elementary school in the US, they showed me painted lines on the floor of the classroom, indicating the zones out of the line of fire for somebody shooting through the small, jail-like window in the door… apparently they train the babies on this.
I wonder what led up to a system like that—overcompensation for a really big mistake in the past? Abstract fears? The genuine wishes of the parents?
(Edit: looks from sibling comments like this [the pickup line technique] might be a hangover from the excesses of the COVID times…)
> I know I’m behind the times, but I was surprised recently when, at an elementary school in the US, they showed me painted lines on the floor of the classroom, indicating the zones out of the line of fire for somebody shooting through the small, jail-like window in the door
It all seems overdone and ridiculous, but when you get a phone call from your child as they sprint from the school building to the safety of the woods due to shots fired in the building, you're glad they did prepare for the "when to stay" and "when to run" decision...and then after you realize that it's even more ridiculous that they had to use that training.
That was the longest couple hours of my life, but knowing that the kids got the f** outta there made it a bit more bearable.
Uff. I can't even imagine. I'm so sorry for you and your kids alike. And I guess it's not the precautionary floor lines that strike me, it's that this style of violence really is so pervasive—and we've concluded that it's such an inevitable part of childhood now—that the reasonable thing to do is to reify it in the physical architecture of their day-to-day lives. And in training young minds to imagine themselves unarmed in a situation of combat...
Of course we don't get to just choose innocence and be surprised by a style of evil behavior over and over again. But I wonder also sometimes if, just as suicides can inspire people who hear about them, large-scale and permanent institutional response to kids-shooting-classmates gives form and legitimacy to that avenue of acting-out, when disaffected kids think about acting out.
So about 12 people were curious but not too surprised when our American friend told us her experience of a school shooting at her university. She was in a different building to the shooter.
The room was shocked into silence when she said "oh, and there was the time at my elementary school..." and had another experience of guns at a school.
We had been surprised by this:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/one-in-15-amer...
There's no incentive not to take unreasonable precautions.
If something happens and you didn't do everything people imagine could have prevented it, you'll be fired, you'll be sued, and your name will be dragged through the mud.
If you take a bunch of unreasonable precautions and nothing happens, you're fine.
America is the special combo of too much coddling and fuck-em, all at once.
School shootings became very publicized twenty years before the pandemic, Columbine in 1999. School shooting drills and lockdowns became more common afterwards as few realistic solutions have been passed and nothing has been done to mollify the fears of parents.
School shootings happen at school, not to and from them. (Obviously kids get shot. But mass shootings requires amassing.)
What’s funny is that a lot of modern parents think the latter option is ridiculous.
That has to be out of the norm. I’ve only heard of kindergarteners needing a guardian.
What's more ridiculous is someone probably sued them and they were forced to do something asinine like that as CYA.
In roughly 2009 my (mostly very well run) school was freaked out when me and my brothers, all age 9-11, wanted to walk the 1.2 miles home. And honestly the teacher and principal involved were/are among the most reasonable, experienced, pragmatic educators I know. I genuinely think the issue is paranoid parents watching them allow such a behavior just as much as the small chance we get clipped on the sidewalk by an out of control car. Aka they were 99% sure my mom would be fine with us walking home, that we weren't lying about her approval, and that if we were lying and something happened while unaccounted for my parents wouldn't hold her responsible, but we live in a silly society, and people are watching.
> What's more ridiculous is someone probably sued them
I'd almost bet nobody sued them. (I'll extend: I'd be surprised if a parent has ever won such a case.) An idiot parent made a stink at a PTA meeting and nobody could be bothered going head to head with Karen.
First of all another parent making a stink at PTA is a genuine situation to want to avoid. The facebook smear campaigns I've seen against teachers are incredible. Also, they absolutely have been sued, and if I remember I'll link a handful later when home. Or the even more fun phenomenon is other parents calling CPS on parents when they witness their children walking home unattended, and that report is actually pursued and adjudicated.
It's not like they're great at it, either. My wife is very visibly hispanic, and on multiple occasions when she went to pick up our (half white but not at all hispanic looking) kids, they'd send the wrong kids to the car because there were only two hispanic-looking kids left.
That sounds like the setup for a Simpson's sketch. Apologies for thinking that's hilarious.
An odd choice of dates in the charts: 1969, 2009, 2017, 2022. 40 years between the first two and less than ten between the other ones. I would have liked to see more uniform spacing between the first two to understand whether the change across those 40 years was gradual.
Our family suffers this insanity, too. This is one of the few things my spouse absolutely refuses to budge on: she won't let our child walk, bicycle, or even take the school bus to school because of vague "danger" that the news media is pumping into her. School is only 3 miles away and we live in a peaceful rural-to-suburban area. The kid could walk that distance at midnight and not be even remotely at risk. No facts, statistics or reasoning works.
It's not always easy to find the data you want. When you're writing a blog post like this, you do research and find the studies that you can, published when they were.
I know those gaps are often due to the data coming from different sources and it's not always possible to normalize it and what not, but I'm always super suspicious when they do that. Also when you see results that are like 1953-1986, like maybe the results from 1952 and 1987 invalidate whatever point they want to make, so they used only the section that helps their case.
I totally understand the anxiety. If you get "DANGER!" pumped into you constantly, it's going to be hard to rationalize your way out of that.
Have you two ever tried walking along the road at around the same time? A calm walk along the same path your kids would be taking would put me at ease about the situation if I was in the same spot.
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My mom walked me to school until I was in 4th grade. She was a single mom and needed to work, so she decided to let me walk to and from school from then on. I made friends on that walk. 30+ years later, I am still friends with many of them even though we live hours away from each other.
I'm not a parent, so I don't know what I don't know; but, I've observed so many kids being shuffled between school, events, "play dates" where it is harder to build deep relationships outside of the parent's sight. Everything is being curated to "ensure" the kids are safe or on the "right" path.
I understand that we live in a different world, but I really do feel that its to the detriment of the kids.
> I understand that we live in a different world
Do we, though?
Kidnappings have been dropping steadily for decades, though maybe it's because kids are indoors more often now. Though FWIW, most kidnappings are from an insane relative, not the random guy promising candy in his van.
I was allowed to play outside unsupervised when I was only 9 years old in 1991, though maybe being on the Keflavik, Iceland US Navy base played a role in that.
> Do we, though?
Yes we do, and it's covered in the article.
It's not kidnappers. It's distance to school.
80% of kids live too far to walk. It's not that their parents are afraid of kidnappers, it's that they literally cannot feasibly walk to and from school every day.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10917142/
And yet, even for students who live within 0.25 mile of school, a minority walk.
Because road crossing are genuinely terrifying today. The automobiles are too big and the drivers are too distracted. I have a hard time walking my kids across the street for school sometimes and that's with a crossing guard.
People are fucking nuts and are driving around in these oversized vehicles with their phones in their faces. You can very casually, very trivially observe this any time you want by simply walking down a semi-busy street and looking at the drivers as they go by.
Yeah, it's just insane that within .25 mile of a school, there is insufficient sidewalk and signaled crossings to allow walking. It's a complete failure of urban planning.
Honestly, it's frequently hard for me to not attribute it to malice.
It doesn't, in the early 90s I was even younger in the US and I had to walk to school about a mile along a busy street. There was no other way for me to get there, no bus or anyone around to drive me.
There's an entire section and even a chart in the article that explains why this is different now
In 1969 only about 30% of kids lived too far away from school for walking to be a realistic option.
In 2009 (and today) that numbers is around 80%.
Walking to and from school is great if you can do it.
Most people cannot do it.
Seriously - I'd love to have my kids walk but we are 22 miles away (in a rural area).
I grew up in a suburban area so I am out of touch with the rural experience.
Because the article is comparing the past with the present, I am curious what parents were doing in the 90s in your area? And, what are parents doing nowadays?
I'm assuming, either car or bus. And I can't imagine that would have changed since the 90s unless there used to be a school much closer.
When I grew up in a rural area I walked 1/3 mile to meet the school bus. Is that not still the typical experience?
Yea. I get it. Schools are getting farther away. I was lucky to be 2-3 miles away which I think is a reasonable distance. But it really depends on what people are comfortable with which is what this whole article comes down to.
I wonder if this also takes into account families choosing to send their kids to schools farther away. In particular, sending them to private or charter schools that are farther away.
why are schools farther away now? That's interesting.
My high school closed down because there weren’t enough families who could afford to live in the neighborhood.
I disagree it is caused by sub-urbanization or zoning. Housing tracts are built with schools.
I would argue the primary cause is an attempt at "school optimization"; the choice to attend the "better" school over the closer school. Also, standardization of schools has decreased with the great variety of charter, private and magnet schools now, increasing the reasons to skip the local school. Personally, I think standardization is best. You could make the same argument about how people choose colleges.
It's in part because every major US city has spent decades underbuilding housing (usually through zoning and permitting that makes middle-density housing implicitly or explicitly illegal), pushing everyone out into the burbs just to find homes they can afford.
It might be due to the school consolidations and schools being moved to cheaper areas.
The article does have a chart that shows distance from their school. I'm curious if there are closer schools that parents chose not to let their child attend. I have known a couple people that drive miles away to drop their kid off to private schools when they have a public school a mile away.
zoning and economies of scale in building out larger schools overall which from a bigger area. throw in pedestrian hostile suburban road design...voila
Nobody wants to pay for teachers. Consequently, they make bigger schools with larger classrooms.
Where I grew up, you had multiple smaller elementary and middle schools eventually feeding into a larger high school.
>Walking to and from school is great if you can do it.
This. I would have let my kids walk to school, but one of the intersections would have been totally unsafe.
You also can't really choose to opt out without leaving the country because lots of places make it illegal for your under <13 kid to go anywhere on their own.
Counter point: I used to walk home from school. Got robbed at gun point several times. Jumped for my skin color numerous times. Had a neighborhood buddy who got stabbed three times on his way home and survived. I can go on and on and on. I had to learn to walk an extra 20-30 minutes to avoid these situations. I will never let my kids walk home in 2025.
Edit: no one told these parents to drive up for pick up like a drive-through. In most cases, it is a choice. You can opt to park like a normal person and walk up. This article is absurd. Most of these parents are too lazy to walk 5 minutes. I’ve seen parents show up 40 minutes to be first in queue…just so they don’t have to get out of their cars. Makes zero sense.
I'm sorry for your experience, but this is extremely location dependent.
Walking home from school in many areas is perfectly safe. In other areas it's not. Making blanket statements or restrictions without context doesn't make sense.
I live in a US suburb where a good chunk of elementary school and upwards walk home. This suburb is >60 years old. It's all about planning.
So you’re conceding this is location dependent. So in effect you’re saying the article is also location dependent? Pick one. If you knew the statistics on kidnapping or missing children in the US, you would not think of this as a “life-style” choice. By the way, 80% of US population live in urban areas so your experience living in 20% is not representative.
> So in effect you’re saying the article is also location dependent?
The article is literally about how location effects are driving the changes.
> Pick one. If you knew the statistics on kidnapping in the US, you would not think of this as a “life-style” choice.
Child abduction is extremely rare in the United States.
You might be confusing sensational headlines with statistics. It's common to report missing children or parental disputes as kidnapping, which people conflate with children being abducted off the street
Here's an article about it with some real statistics from the FBI: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
For some perspective: The number of children abducted by strangers in the United States every year is similar to the number of children who die from head injuries from riding a bike: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8909479/
More people in the United States die from lightning strikes every year.
There aren’t many places in the US where it is safe AND practical for kids to walk home. If you don’t understand this, then you basically live in a bubble.
> There aren’t many places in the US where it is safe AND practical for kids to walk home.
Discussing the practicality aspect is literally the point of the article.
Above I was addressing your arguments about danger and kidnappers.
You seem to be missing the point. In the vast majority of cases locations being unsuitable for walking/cycling to school isn't an immutable law of nature - it's a result of deliberate choices made by humans.
Building primarily low-density car-dependent suburbs is a choice. Building horribly oversized car infrastructure is a choice. Not building bike or pedestrian infrastructure is a choice. Building one megaschool instead of a handful of smaller local schools is a choice.
People voted to have slightly lower taxes and spend a few hours a week waiting in the pickup line. That's a lifestyle choice, even if they weren't aware they were making it.
If I lived in the kind of third world hellhole where this was a realistic scenario, I'd leave the country.
It’s the US. People on here are so sheltered.
The vast majority of the US is not like this. Yes, there are some (generally poor, urban) areas with crime problems. The average middle class town or suburb? Walking to school would be safe, if we simply built sidewalks instead of 6 lane highways.
The majority of the US is absolutely not like this.
You keep accusing other people of living in a bubble, but you're indexing your entire experience on to anecdotes of where you grew up as an individual experience.
Hmm. I don't know the race of the poster you are referring to. I do know from friends who were not White, their experience living in the South was vastly different from mine.
In all honesty, statistically, that person's assertions are highly likely not to be fact.
It's like the man who has happened on "several" three-alarm fires in his life. How many times does a person happen on even one three-alarm fire in a lifetime? Let alone "several". The likelihood you're either speaking to an arsonist or a liar is very high.
Same is true for people who are robbed at gunpoint "several" times. The statistical likelihood that you're either speaking to a criminal or a liar is extremely high.
I lived all over this country. Inner cities to rural areas. North to South. East to West. Do you even have kids? And why are you targeting me on here?
You don't even need to leave the country, as these locations are very specific parts of cities in the country.
Probably just a city, not the whole country.
My parents used to live in a city where violence and crime was common, and I received all sorts of lessons from them about how I shouldn’t go outside, don’t talk to strangers, always be guarded, etc. But my family had moved to a quiet, crime-free suburb and everything they told me seemed like the complete opposite of what I was experiencing in reality when growing up.
You are raising your kids in a neighborhood that is prone to this level of violence?
When I was young, my family was on food stamps when my parents were laid off. It took them some time to find work. For some people, they have no choice where they live.
Kids go missing roughly every minute in this country. I am not risking anything to feel good about implied negligence.
About 95% of children reported missing to the FBI were found to have run away.
Child abduction by strangers is extremely rare: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
You keep referring that article but you can feel free to look up official stats.
The article cites the FBI, DOJ, and NCMEC.
We live across the street from our kids elementary and middle schools. There is a sidewalk and a crosswalk to the school. Parents in our subdivision still choose to drive in because "the crosswalk is too dangerous". Schools can't afford crossing guards, county engineers claim it is an enforcement issue, police can't cover it with their limited staffing, and Republicans are banning school speeding cameras in Georgia.
Crossing guards aren't a substitute for good road design. There should probably be a narrower road by schools to slow people down as well as raised crosswalks. Similar to https://maps.app.goo.gl/TpAiphV8iJZ7j6mY9 as an example. This is across from a school in England where a very high percentage walk
> county engineers claim it is an enforcement issue,
They are probably professional engineers who can lose their license if anyone discovered that there have long been known road designs that prevent this. It will take some research, but the law is on your side to have them dismissed for cause if enforcement is all they are relying on.
It would violate professional standards for a traffic engineer to implement a more pedestrian-safety oriented design at an intersection before the requisite number of children have been killed to justify it.
>Schools can't afford crossing guards
Parents could get together and volunteer to do crossing duty or hire a private crossing guard, it probably wouldn't even cost very much.
New York City saw a 55% reduction in fatalities in school zones with cameras, and Oglethorpe County, Georgia reported zero accidents in a high-risk zone for three months after camera installation, compared to 1–2 daily crashes previously.
Using a monthly prevention rate of 0.9–1.4 deaths[0], a ban could result in 10–17 additional fatalities annually per monitored corridor.
So, after how many bonus deaths will Republicans be held liable?
0. https://ssti.us/2024/03/11/speed-cameras-lower-speeds-and-pr...
I looked at the author’s Google map view of the 2 miles they couldn’t walk to school, and the enormous grassed area next to the road would have meant I’d be walking that quite happily in the UK.
During nice weather, surely, but it might be very unpleasant when raining.
When I hear these stories about how children in USA go to school, I am always astonished.
In Europe, my parents took me to the school one single time, for the first school day, when I was 6 years old. Everyday after that I have gone there and come back alone, for a walk of about one mile and a half. Several years later, I continued my studies at a more distant school, to which I was going alone using the public transportation of the city, by bus, the same as most of my colleagues.
Even during the 1st grade (i.e. at 6 to 7 years old) any child would have considered very shameful to be brought to the school by their parents, as an indication that they would have been somehow helpless or handicapped.
“Nice weather” /= UK
True, but "bad weather" /= UK as well. There is a large spectrum, and UK mostly sits as just a little worse than nice.
Shhhh you’ll ruin our reputation.
Yeah, this is much better than the numerous suburbs without sidewalks (such a weird thing from a European perspective) but that country road with ample green space left and right? It's fine. Would benefit from sidewalks and bike lane of course, but the author makes it sound like there is a steep cliff left and right of the road.
> Yeah, this is much better than the numerous suburbs without sidewalks (such a weird thing from a European perspective)
As children in such a situation, we would have a lot of fun as pedestrians to be a nuisance to the cars that drive on the road, too. :-) Having this perspective, I rather think that the reason why sidewalks are built is because of the complaints of car drivers.
As someone who has done a bunch of long distance walks in the UK, I’ve encountered any number of relatively rural or small town roads with no shoulders along walls or hedgerows that are at least as scary as a pedestrian as anything I’ve encountered in the US.
And yet you’re still with us. Jumping onto the wall or into a hedge is part of the fun.
It's not very safe if you can't get off a curvy road with no shoulder, especially in poor visibility. You're probably OK as a bet as a sometimes thing but not something I'd, have especially a kid, do on a daily basis. One reason I didn't learn to ride a bike as a kid because that basically described the road our house was on and fatalities associated with kids riding bikes wasn't rare.
The ones who aren't still with us don't post comments on HN anymore.
Yeah, "I didn't die taking a jump in a wingsuit" isn't actually a recommendation that's a safe thing to do. Or, hey, plenty of people survived climbing K2.
Right. I walked home from school every day and it was about 4 miles through farm fields and along country roads with blind corners.
See here, and deer were hit regularly on the 4m road I walked... but even as a kid I recognised it was kind of dangerous, and I wouldn't want my own kids to do the same.
4 miles? Luxury.
I used to dream of walking just 4 miles to school.
I had to walk SIXTEEN miles in the wet, cold snow AND pay teacher for permission to come to school!
(edit: It's the Four Yorkshireman sketch. A joke, people...)
School?!? Well fiddledeedee which luxury part of Yorkshire are you from?
When I were a lad I used to walk sixteen miles just for a kick up the arse and then have to walk home again to work under t’spinning machine at t’mill for the other 14 hours of the day.
It does look pretty nice, although in the mud the kids might prefer to walk on the unlit pavement where the trucks probably drive really really fast.
Plenty of space to build a separated bike path for minuscule cost, though.
The US has a lot of 4ft+ hood height pick up trucks with drivers on their phone. Basically, all the cars are heavier, higher, and cause more damage.
Although, that specific picture’s grassy area is sufficiently large that there is room to walk far away from the cars.
We used to have smaller pick up trucks, but they were eliminated by fuel efficiency rules that require larger trucks. :P
I don’t buy that. People like to sit higher than others, and be in a bigger vehicle. It’s a power/status thing.
That is why an SUV is chosen over a minivan.
You don't need a pickup truck to be on the phone! It's truly shocking to see just how many (usually speeding!) drivers are on their phones on the highway and elsewhere.
Rural property owners in the US are somewhat likely to shoot first and ask questions about trespassers only later. In some parts of the country the Road is the only obviously public land. (Even that can't be taken for granted sometimes, as private streets exist in some areas, too.)
No they are not. That is what happens in the movies, but in reality those people are just like anyone else - mostly nice people. Even stand your ground laws which allow you to shoot without asking questions only apply in specific situations and are unlikely to apply (though without specific details I cannot say for sure)
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutio...
Especially noted:
> Overall, rural counties had the highest rate of gun deaths.
From your own link:
- Large metropolitan counties had the highest gun homicide rate compared to rural counties.
- Rural counties had the highest rate of gun suicides compared to metropolitan counties.
:)
This is still tiny numbers.
Sure, small numbers, low statistics, but it is still in the list of reasons why "Americans don't trust cutting through a random field and see only a dangerous road in a picture like that street view" in some parts of the country. The US has a fascinating relationship to "private property".
How many kids walking to or from school have been shot by rural landowners? What you're describing is illegal.
It varies from state to state. See "Castle Doctrine" and its variants, including the worst "Stand Your Ground" ones. The US has more pockets of dystopia than are necessarily obvious.
I just want to highlight this link in the article, about a mother who was arrested because her son walked less than a mile into town (population 370) on his own [0]. Arrested. For putting him in danger.
What a mess.
[0] https://reason.com/2024/11/11/mom-jailed-for-letting-10-year...
Unfortunately we are one of those families.
The bus service is completely unreasonable. They shopped it out to the lowest bidder and the stops are all in terrible spots on busy streets. It also takes longer to sit and wait in the cold with a 6 year old than it would be to just drive there and back.
> takes longer to sit and wait in the cold with a 6 year old than it would be to just drive there and back
1st grade is probably too young to wait alone. But by 3rd grade I'd expect a child to be able to bundle themselves up.
Putting the bus stop on a major road without adequate place to stand is a problem. But a 5 year old is totally capable of waiting for a bus, given the appropriate location to do so. Even more so in a typical suburb, where there's likely several of them waiting at the same place (when I was a kid, we walked half a block to the corner and waiting in a group of ~5-~15 kids).
> It also takes longer to sit and wait in the cold with a 6 year old than it would be to just drive there and back.
I don't know how your bus driver would handle it but even back in the 80s, some parents would drive their kids to the bus stop and let them wait in the car until the bus came. As they got older, like 5th or 6th grade, they would be taught to dress warm for the wait.
Our school system wouldn't send buses if you were within two miles of the school. We were (seriously) 1.99 miles away, so we had to drive our kids back and forth.
The post-Covid labor market shift has raised the price of school bus drivers beyond what schools are willing to pay for.
Our child was being bullied on the bus by kids twice their age because there was no one other than the driver to monitor. I will not subject a kindergartner to that.
One time the bus arrived a full hour late and the people we could call to ask where it was had already went home. I was considering calling the police. Turns out the bus was late because they didn't have enough busses and it had to complete a different route first.
School has been enshittified.
100% agree with the title.
I live ~1 mile from the local school complex (primary, middle, high all share a gigantic piece of land, though are separate full-size schools). You literally don't have to cross a street to get there from my house - it's all neighborhood walking paths and there's a short underpass at the one road. Yet, kids are not supposed to walk. There's a bus, which isn't the end of the world. Except in the time it takes to wait for the bus, you could walk most of the way to school. And 1/4 of the parents drive their kids anyway.
It's completely absurd.
Of course, I walk the ~1 mile to my office in the other direction and most of my coworkers think I'm a loon. So, I guess this shouldn't be surprising. Americans are just hard-wired to drive even the shortest distances. We've done such a piss-poor job with urban planning and transit design that 3+ generations of Americans think anything but a car is unthinkable (literally, I don't think it crosses their minds).
> Yet, kids are not supposed to walk.
According to who?
Reading these comments reminds me that America is a big place and experiences are very different from one location to the next. My closest school has hundreds of kids walking to and from through all the neighborhoods if you drive by during morning or afternoon hours.
My last in-office job had numerous people with 20-40 minute walks as part of their commute (except in rain/winter). We had people who routinely biked 10+ miles to the office.
It's not "Americans are lazy". It's the people you're around.
According to the school. They don't like releasing kids on their own for some reason. neighbors wanted their son to walk home alone and the school said the kid could either take the bus, or a parent could show up and walk him out. Yes, for the same ~1 mile walk I describe above, that's all paved paths in a very safe neighborhood outside DC (Reston VA). Not all of Reston is like this, but out are is VERY walkable (~1 mile to schools, ~1 mile to shopping, ~1.5-2 miles to the town center and Metro station).
I remember an Irish cousin of my mother’s moving to Reno, NV in the 90s. She used to dry her laundry on a line outdoors, where the 40° heat meant that it would dry in minutes. Well, the neighbours found this bizarre almost to the point of being offensive and she got kind of ostracised for doing it… and then she had to join in with what everyone else did and used the dryer for 2 hours burning electricity to achieve the same result that could have been done in 1/4 of the time for free.
This problem is over for me, as my son has graduated, but part of the problem is NIMBY'ified suburban roads that dead-end rather than connecting neighborhoods (in order to cut down on neighborhood traffic).
My son's school was about 250 meters from his mom's house. Due to the NIMBY way the neighborhoods were built, he would have had to ride his bike or walk 2.5 miles on busy roads w/o bike lanes to get to his mom's house. The direct route was 2 dead end roads that should have connected the neighborhoods together. But instead, there was ~30m of dense forest marked with "no trespassing" signs.
This meant that me and his mom had to wait in the school line rather than him being able to walk/bike to and from school. Even when I had custody, I would have much rather picked him up from his mom's house than school because the line was miserable.
I was so happy when he got his license and was able to drive himself.
In the Netherlands they build the neighborhood like that, but at the dead end of the street is a small path for walking/biking. So driving to school would take 2 km, but walking only 500 m.
Yes, this would have been so much smarter. But in this case, they apparently sold extra large lots to the surrounding houses, and made no provisions for pedestrians. Welcome to the USA.
Great article. It wouldn't be that difficult for schools and cities to encourage walking or biking. There are lots of easy things that could be done. My daughter's school doesn't properly clear the sidewalks during winter. The giant parking lot is always immaculate though. They actually renovated and rerouted traffic to make it less safe for pedestrians. My daughter's friend was hit in a crosswalk (with a crossing guard!) by a parent leaving school after dropping her kid off. No penalty to the driver.
I used to walk or take the bus, even in elementary school. I am not sure at what point parents decided they must take their kids to school. We did have parents dropping kids off and it was busy but not like it is now. I know then, at least to me, there was a sort of an air about about seeing kids being picked up or dropped off because they didn't have to ride the bus. Maybe that's it, parents gave in to not wanting their kids to feel less about themselves because they had to ride the bus?
Sometimes I truly wonder how the US is so far ahead in innovation and efficiency. This is unthinkable, how many hours of driving to and fro + this queue each day.
Here I am, in Germany, my kid goes to school by himself since second grade. Most of his classmates started to walk, bike, or take the train, bus or tram themselves at 3rd or 4th grade. Beyond 6th grade, it's considered a spoiled baby.
Thinking through where I've lived -- a lot of the original school buildings built in circa 1950 were more in city center. The article touches on the move of schools to the outskirts of town as a cost savings measure but I think the opposite may be true.
As population and (perceived) facilities increased, the schools built new buildings in farmland or other wide open areas on the outskirts of town to have more room for stuff like stadiums, huge auditoriums, bigger playgrounds. The land may be cheaper but the new high schools are almost more like college campuses vs. stately buildings in the middle of town.
There's an appetite for more and we've relocated schools to make more room not save money.
Schools relocated as parents moved to the suburbs. The schools saw this coming and built schools near those new houses. Schools sometimes see things coming and buy farmland 10-20 years in advance so that when the suburb expands they have the land to build on, but the schools are not built until it is obvious that the parents are coming.
> Likewise, a mom was recently arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk into town.
That linked article is incredible to me (considering how much I used to walk around at that age).
If our culture becomes so backwards that you will actually be criminalized for letting your kids move around independently, then of course we'll be doomed to car pickup lines forever.
Had to dig around for this but it is quite illuminating: https://www.freerangekids.com/how-children-lost-the-right-to...
looks like that is a bit of blogspam, ultimate source is https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children...
Surely behavior of children on a busses plays _some_ role in this decision. Not sure how they would even gather stats on this but busses in my youth were total zoos.
Further, schools near me won't allow many children to walk home even within a safe walking distance with parental consent for (and I quote) "liability reasons". Absurd.
You have to enact protection for the schools from that, or their insurance goes insane (or refuses to be available for any money).
Where I am the school line is mainly to prevent kids from running between the cars; anyone who has been authorized can just be let free and walk home - some of whom just walk a block to where their parent is waiting.
This is the kind of article that needs to get into national culture. We gotta change the way we live. I don't know how to get it to happen, but we need more people doing this.
People need to stop being fucking pussies and actually engage with dumb arguments. It seems people these days are so conflict averse that no one ever speaks up. "We all have our opinions!" Yeah, and sometimes they are stupid.
Yeah, but even things like biking to school. Nothing to do with conflict.
Currently we're a 39 minute walk from school; a little long for a kid at age 8.
We're like a 10 minute drive, in traffic with lights etc, and I think basically a 10 minute bike ride. There isn't a good biking system because the roads are set up like a grid, and there's no walking path through it.
I think for biking culture to thrive you need bike only or bike/ped paths, otherwise you end up having to bike on busy streets or stop at many intersections.
I'm going to try to organize something like a mini bike bus in my neigborhood.
Like many societal issues, support for bike transport would be one way to address this.
To help support that, it should be expected that on the first day of school, police officers will ride bikes along all the routes students are expected to cover --- to help support that, bring back truant officers and put them on bicycles.
I frequently contemplate the cumulative pollution of all these cars idling in every town across the country 5 days a week twice a day.
I think parental paranoia plays a very small role in this. If at least one thing were to change: reasonable schoolbus routes, walkability, traffic safety, public transport, then we'd see a huge uptick.
Not much to do for most of the parents, TBH, especially if you want to get into a good school.
Me? I picked the public elementary school 10 minutes of walk away instead of the private one that is 20+ minutes of driving. I don't want everyone in the household gets frustrated pretty much every Mon-Fri.
Secondary school is going to be a bit of issue. We do have one that is adjacent to the said elementary school but it is not very good. But then my son would be 11 years old by then so hopefully he can just take the bus.
As the author mentioned the rise of ebikes is counteracting this, however the ones popular with teens (Surrons and other similar chinese brands) require you to cut one wire to remove the speed limiter and then they can do 50MPH.
The idea of common spaces in American cities largely died during & after Covid. Anything you did in public (gyms, eating out, public transport, apartment common areas) was suddenly prey to whatever idea a politician had that morning. I think we all remember walking into a restaurant with a mask on, to promptly take it off as soon as you sat down. At the same time as these guidelines were being piled on, basically all laws below murder stopped being enforced. So you had to negotiate a bus full of drug addicts shooting up and riding for free, or leave the sidewalk because it had been taken over by a tent city.
Personal transport is required in America, the places with the infrastructure to avoid it dont have the capacity to govern (any big city). The places with the governing capacity (suburban, rural areas) dont have the infrastructure.
This is why I was adamant that my kids took the school bus when it is an option.
Even though my family has the flexible schedule to handle dropping kids via car, by using the bus system I help support the community and others who might not have that flexibility.
Plus, the school bus is one of the first places a kid might be without (much) adult supervision. A tremendous growth opportunity, where you learn how to deal with discomfort, difference and drama.
I didn’t understand at the time how much of a privilege it was that I could walk to school where I grew up (with crossing guards for the elementary schoolers, even!) and more importantly that my parents encouraged it, even if it was a bit of a hike to middle and high school without a bike.
Unfortunately we moved during high school and lived something like 15 miles from the new school; at least there was a bus.
This is a good piece that is undermined somewhat by the AI imagery. My goal isn't to just complain about AI, but I've been reflecting on how my own mental process unfolded while reading this.
> Note: I used AI to create this image rather than pull one from another site without permission.
I don't have kids, and while I've seen pickup lines from time to time, I have very little first-hand experience with them. So my brain reacts to the image:
- Is this image a realistic representation?
- If it is, I have no first-hand knowledge to verify it
- If it's not, I have no way to know without going and looking for images myself
- If it is, it's undermining the content by representing something real with something fake
Artwork/illustrations/visualizations are often critical when communicating via text. But I think that when someone is writing about a factual matter - a real phenomenon that is occurring regularly - using fake imagery is just the wrong choice.
What about the people that report parents to the police for endangering their children by allowing them to walk/bike to school?
If the child is not in any actual danger, then people who call emergency services or police need to be cited for wasting resources.
Busybodies seem to call because of "what if" things. That child's actual danger is the busybody.
Apparently a child being alone constitutes being in danger. From the article [0]
[0] https://reason.com/2024/11/11/mom-jailed-for-letting-10-year...
> If the child is not in any actual danger, then people who call emergency services or police need to be cited for wasting resources.
As a mandatory reporter, my instructions are if there is any possibility report and let the experts figure it out. There is no harm to me if I report and nothing is found. However if they discover something and find that I was in contact with the kid in question they will investigate: if there is anything that I should have seen I'll be arrested for not reporting it.
I appreciate that mandatory reporting laws exist for evidence of abuse, and to an extent, suspicion of abuse; but does your training say that children left alone less than a few hours, is abuse or is suspicious by itself, and needs to be reported?
There is always the possibility for anything, so that cannot be the bar.
My training is if there is any possibility of anything report. They specifically told me not to think. Telling me a few hours is okay would mean I now have something to think about and I'm not allowed to do think.
> any possibility of anything
How do I report you for taking the time to reply here instead of reporting that Amy, Brad, Charlie, Drake, Emily, everyone, etc.. parents all have the possibility of abusing them, that their siblings all have the possibility of abusing them, that their friends all have the possibility of abusing them, that their teachers all have the possibility abusing them, that you could be a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning and not remember that you could also be abusing them, that the police have the possibility of abusing them, that secret agents could be sneaking into their house at night and abusing them.
If that was your instructions, then your full-time job should be making reports and nothing else.
See how absurd your instructions were, or what you think your instructions were?
I'm reporting what the instructions are, not what I think about them.
Unfortunately bad instructions and no one getting those instructions changed, helps lead to this nonsense that we hear about in the news, and the thousand (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) cases that are just as bad but not as newsworthy.
From the article:
> It’s not just a message to parents, it’s the broader society.[...] A mom was recently arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk into town. These types of incidents only fuel the school car pickup culture
It's actually illegal in my area to let my kid go anywhere unattended under 12.
Came here to say the same. I have seen multiple stories of parents getting arrested for letting their kids walk home long distances.
Raising children is no longer a communal effort.
If you let your kid out roaming, walking home from school, and the child causes a minor issue, you get the wrath of "Why aren't you watching your kid?"???
So we've developed this culture around ensuring that the child is accounted for at all hours of the day. Drop off, pickup from school, included.
Moved to Germany. Put kids 4 6 in school. School sends letter home: parents, please stop driving kids to school. Walking is part of the experience.
It’s the same all over Europe.
The distance to school is a social choice. But in the US, kids can’t even get off a school bus without a parent waiting
Fear culture and security theater
The bar chart is pretty funny. "Over 3 miles" is the highest bucket? That's supposed to be far?
I went to school in a semi-rural school district, one of the largest in the state by area. I just checked Google Maps and the high school is 13 miles away, 16 minutes by car (much of it highway), and maybe a half hour by school bus if I remember correctly. It could be a bit tedious, but it wasn't a terrible commute by any means.
> Parents are not simply choosing to drive their children to school because it’s fun to sit in a long line. It is becoming more of a necessity because schools are more spread out than before, or at least families are living further from their schools.
Necessity? I don't see what's wrong with school buses. They're just about the only practical form of mass transit in rural areas. They work for all ages, in any weather where the school is open at all.
> The bar chart is pretty funny. "Over 3 miles" is the highest bucket? That's supposed to be far?
The buckets were chosen because 3 miles is farther than you'd reasonably expect kids to be able to walk to and from school every day. They say this right under the chart.
It's not helpful to do chest-thumping to compare whose farthest away from school when the entire point of the section is that 80% of people fall into that bucket.
> Necessity? I don't see what's wrong with school buses. They're just about the only practical form of mass transit in rural areas.
Again, you've missed the point of the article. In cities, students are spread out in all directions. It's not feasible for a bus to loop around an entire city to pick everyone up when they're spread all over.
You’re right, I don’t get it.
Why is it expected that kids should be able to walk to school? Seems like that’s a pretty blinkered view by someone who never leaves the city? In a rural district, very few kids can do that, and that’s why there are buses for everyone else.
Also, why wouldn’t school buses work in a denser area? That’s why they have multiple school buses doing multiple routes.
All the usual arguments for mass transit should apply for school buses, too. Density should make providing bus service easier, not harder.
> Why is it expected that kids should be able to walk to school?
Because we typically don't let kids drive. If they're able to walk to school then they can walk themselves to and from school without the help of an adult (even one driving the bus), once they are responsible enough to.
That’s a circular argument. There’s nothing wrong with relying on a bus driver or taking a bus. Adults do it, too.
Does this article really need a visual aid of cars waiting in a line, let alone a sloppy AI generated visual aid?
The concept in the article is foreign to nearly the entire planet.
My kids' school used to let parents into the yard during dropoff and pickup. It was wonderful: a time for the kids to play with their friends and the parents to mingle and catch up. Now we have the car dropoff/pickup line. I'm for "everyone park and walk your kid into school" or "let kids go home by themselves if it's safe to do so" [0]. The car pickup and dropoff is the absolute worst.
[0] Our current bike route from home to school isn't optimal -- too many busy streets where drivers routinely run reds. That's a rant for another day...
> The classic yellow school bus is a national icon.
It is, but like the pickup line, it’s also a national embarrassment. Half the buses in my town are ancient and belch black smoke like a semi rolling coal.
I guess this is what they call American Exceptionalism?
The article makes a lot of great points, but looks to miss that kids are enrolled in a lot of after school activities these days.
I was never enrolled in any as a kid and never really expected for my kid to be, because I thought parents were the motivating factor for kids to get into a bunch of activities, but IME they aren't. My kid loves her activities and picking her up to shuttle her directly to it is a lot quicker than using a bus or walking.
The article mentions Japan as a comparison, where kids are also enrolled in a lot of after-school activities. They tend to get there on their own.
We park on the other side of a city park from my daughter's school. ...The five minute walk thru the park together is a highlight of my day.
I was driven to school during preschool, kindergarten, and part of grade school, biked or walked in junior high or high school. My kid is in preschool and I drive him or walk him to school. He'll be able to walk to junior high and high school, and will probably take the bus to grade school. I don't mind the pickup line right now.
Californians should read this too:
(TLDR: It's Prop 13's fault)
https://www.kqed.org/news/11980715/why-dont-more-bay-area-ki...
>California has fewer school buses than in other parts of the country. A survey conducted by the Federal Highway Administration found that nationally, almost 40% of school-aged kids ride a school bus. In California, that number is only 8%.
>Like so many questions related to school funding and services, the answer to Winters’ question has roots in the passage of Proposition 13
I think people would be surprised that there's school districts where the median home value is $1.5M, but the district can't afford any school bus service except for federally mandated school buses for special ed kids.
For those familiar with the Bay Area - Fremont: https://fremontunified.org/about/business-services/transport...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children...
How children lost the right to roam in four generations
Our infrastructure in general is a national embarrassment. I'm more pessimistic on this category than anything else. The best possible future I can imagine in the USA, transportation-wise, is not having to hold the steering wheel during a robo traffic jam.
The pickup point should be 1km from the school unless you have a doctors note. Kids need to walk that much or more anyway for health.
It’s awful. Big long line where I live and it used to be handled by one school bus and kids walking home. Imagine the waste of human productive time, fuel, etc. I’m always astounded this many people don’t have a job to be at at 3pm.
Mayhap part of it is the "modern smoke break" - the people picking up like to have an excuse to take a break from work in the early afternoon.
I live in a relatively residential neighborhood in NYC next to a school (outside of the congestion zone). The morning dropoffs and afternoon pickups are insane. It literally causes a gridlock for a couple hours in a part of the neighborhood that has like 4 intersections. Somehow we have to get back to the days when parents trusted the community that their kid is going to get home safe, otherwise this nonsense is never going to end.
Sorry, but this one's on the parents. My mom would never put up with driving us in every day. It was either take the bus or walk, you lazy kid.
Putting so much emphasis on cars, and being in cars is a national embarrassment
At the core this behavior is simply a version of social proof. Parents see what other parents do and/or kids see friends being picked up and then put pressure on their parents to do the same. Then it gets to a tipping point where it just becomes the thing that you do (and nobody thinks otherwise or wants to tell their kids they won't do this or questions it).
It's also a way for a parent to think somehow they are doing the right thing and get a little enjoyment in their head (despite the time involved or wasted) 'I am a good parent'. Doesn't involve as much effort as other things a parent does (or should do) it's simple (other than the time).
The weirdest part of my school day was wandering out of the recess lot and trying to find Mom’s car every day. A lot of my classmates were bused in from 15 miles away and we were second-class “townies” but yet, we lived outside the parochial territory. Fifth Estate, I suppose.
Once Dad bought a new car and surprised us by not picking us up in the one we recognized?!
Around 5th grade I had some sort of trauma-drama on the soccer field, needed to call in Mom for a pickup. I didn’t know what a busy-tone sounded like despite figuring out the payphone on campus. I held the receiver to my ear for 10 minutes anxiously hoping Mom would answer.
I believe the rare school bus rides were field trips, and once my friend and I were in the rear, frantically waving and smiling at every other motorist to see how they’d respond, and we failed to cause any accidents
I feel it was a curse on Mom to put so many miles on Soccer Mom Car. Parents couldn’t hardly wait for our maturity and licensing!
At many schools, the school bus was an embarrassment too, or at least some routes as neighborhood demographics changed
The most rambunctious, violent, harrowing and underpoliced part of the day
Not offering a solution, just an observation
Helicopter parents exist because public trust is completely eroded.
I don't want to blame it on diversity but the example provided in the article is a homogenous-culture society with high trust.
Gigantic tank-like vehicles with worse line of sight then actual tanks, insane levels of crime that are rampant all over the US compared to Japan, etc.
Make tank-like trucks and SUVs illegal to manufacturer is a good start. It's going to be tough to compete with homogenous first-world countries on culture and crime.
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Fortunately, there's homeschool. In the amount of time it takes someone to load up the kids into the car, drive to school, wait in these long lines, and then do the reverse, that should be enough instructor-led time for an entire homeschooling curriculum.
The best part is, you won't have to subject your children to marxists and people that look like literal clowns that fell face-first into a tackle box.
We can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm. We'll look back on the primitive times when kids couldn't just click a button or whisper an instruction for a ride like anyone else.
500 manually driven cars and 500 robocars take the same space. Building schools, cities, and communities in the US that are pedestrian based is the only real solution. The author summarizes as "We need to thicken up our places, slow down cars, and install pedestrian or biking infrastructure" which I couldn't agree with more.
> can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm
I live in a well-to-do community where many kids are chauffeured to school. The problem isn't just the parents' wasted time. It's the congestion and lack of agency this behaviour bestows on children. Head to head, I'd bet the kid who can navigate themselves to and from school outcompetes the one chauffered in a robotaxi in novel environments.
I used to be in this camp, but when it comes down to it busses, trains, and other shared transportation options are both the past and the future. Kids from all economic backgrounds can use them at once, they are extremely space and energy efficient, and the necessity of walking the final leg to the central access point is healthier for our bodies and our communities.
I'm not in disagreement, robot cars would be awesome, but why do we need scifi technology here in the usa to solve something that is already a solved problem the world over.
It really is a mental problem more than anything else. The inability to imagine a virtuous public realm welcoming to children, conjure its value in one's mind eye, and commit to the necessary material changes.
We need busses.
If it has to be techy-flashy, would it satisfy you if the bus was self-driving?
Busses are slow as snot in many cases, because the routes are insane.
We can walk to school and see the bus when we leave the house and easily beat it by many minutes.
(Busses being slow and routes taking long is probably a design feature, allowing schools to let out at 3PM but parents to not have to be home until 5PM or later).
But the real final solution won't be robocars, it'll be robokids. Then if you lose one you can just get a replacement.
If you can beat the bus by walking then you shouldn't be on the bus. (unless in order to pull this off you have to do something stupidly dangerous)
Though you are correct a bus is slow, done right they are faster than walking.