We walked and biked even skied to school in the winter. Some kids had quite the journey. Now my nephew is 8 and and there are like 20 cars waiting in front of the school, or the closest they can drive. They also complained that it’s pretty dangerous because of all the traffic, not realising that they are the traffic. No car would be there without them. It’s madness.
If only there were free public transport provided to every student outside a small radius of the school. That would make things so much simpler!
Just gonna throw this out there, while yes car=bad and carbrain is real, sometimes its just administrative bullshit that fails to consider the realities of their student’s and/or parents’ needs and living situations.
When my kids started school, because my youngest is special needs and other specifics they both started around the same time in different grades. For the majority of the student body my town’s school district will simply bus between different schools plus a couple of specific designated points so that everyone who lives within city limits is within about half a mile of a place that the buses pick up and drop off. They require a parent/guardian present at pickup time for 3k-Kindergarten bus pickup and dropoff. For students in special ed they instead get to take the special ed bus which has extra staff and seatbelts and only picks up and drops off at the home and also requires a parent/guardian present. Both do pickups and dropoffs at about the same time. I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Since my wife has been a stay at home mom (primarily due to daycare costs exceeding what she would realistically make) and can’t be in 2 places at once[1]^ we were forced to do our own pickups and dropoffs instead of bussing. I’m sure there’s similar levels of bullshit if your kids are in different grades putting them at different schools because the local school administrators seem to be really good at not fully thinking things through like that and usually require experiencing the consequences of their actions to change course on a decision
You’re describing an exception, which is of course real and necessary. The vast majority of a school pickup line is simply carbrain and some vague “mama bear” bullshit.
I was going to say we don’t know for sure why so many parents choose to drive their kids, but it turns out after a quick Google that there has been at least one study into this matter, and it seems a large portion of the surveyed respondents can be attributed to carbrain (vague “stranger danger” and “risk of bullying” as listed reasons, which the bullying risk may be real or perceived but that’s hard to empirically determine) but also a significant number drive their kids due to “traffic danger” indicating that it is poor road design pushing a significant portion of parents to choose to perform school pickups and dropoffs by car. And most of the remainder drive their kids to and from school out of “social convenience” (which is probably where my specific instance falls) so based on this one study based on a survey of almost 300 parents we could actually reduce the number of cars in those lines by a significant portion by making other options than driving more convenient for parents, but a large number state they’re primarily concerned about pedestrian safety which is more of an infrastructure challenge than a direct “car brain” challenge
I really wish I was better at reading studies because that is some fascinating data that I’d love to play with some more and see what other conclusions I could tease out of it
Back in my day, the early to mid 90s, there were still pickups. There was a shorter line, it was easier, because there were fewer people.
Where I live now, and where I lived then, there was cutoffs for the bus, like a mile or more. My town now, barely anyone is a mile from anything. There’s one bus for the school, and they use it for underprivileged and disabled students. Everyone else is on their own, and so if you live a mile from school, having your four or five year old walk sometimes isn’t feasible.
We live about a mile from school. I drive halfway and park and we walk the other half, because I cannot stand the pickup line. But some people go, drop their kid, and head to work, and so it’s completely understandable that they use the pickup line.
Sometimes, the parents forget to pick up the kids so the teachers get to decide if they leave a child all alone with no help or if the teacher works unpaid over time
I work in child care and the regulations behind this are fucked. There’s no gray area and staff risks prison time for not following them. I get how these laws and regulations get implemented. Even “good parents” will think it’s completely reasonable to be late to pick up your children. Once in a while isn’t a problem but when you are in charge of hundreds of kids and too many parents have that mentality it creates a cascade of issues for staff. (child care works have lives too) so please contact the school/facility if you are going to be late and don’t be late constantly.
Here the kids just walked or cycled home. Bus if you lived further away or didn’t wanna cycle in the winter. But I grew up in a small town in Estonia in the 00s. It may have been literally feared at the time by people not from our town, but generally nobody would hurt a 7 year old and even once you got older, usually people’s beefs were with kids from the other towns nearby, not locals.
No. Bullshit. When I got cut loose from 70s-80s elementary I was on my fucking own. We could walk, ride, skate, whatever. We did not require a fucking adult to care for us. Bell rings? GTFO! BYE!
Oh yea dude, people doing thankless low paying jobs that require the same education as jobs that pay much better are sooooo greedy and not at all passionate.
I got lied to about my placement tests for no one’s gain. I got stone walled and gaslighted every time I tried improving my situation.
The most passion I ever heard from a teacher the was a rightwing asshole in my civics class when he was complaining about immigrants or welfare queens. My science teacher had to be asked directly about climate change for him to utter his take on that.
When I first moved to the town I live in now, I was impressed by the all new schools. However I eventually realized they replaced a bunch of older neighborhood schools with a smaller number of bigger schools. They saved money by providing a worse educational experience and making walking less likely.
We walked to my kids elementary school but the town saved money by not plowing the sidewalks in winter, nor forcing residents to. Our walk would require walking on a major street - until my ex went full Karen and made them plow
When my kids got to middle school, we were in “walking” distance so there was no bus. However that was a full mile including crossing a six lane road whose light was always broken, and they didn’t spring for a crossing guard . We ended up choosing a private school in a different town, so there were no buses nor walkability
Regional school districts are now common. More kids goto schools that are not even in their towns
In my childhood in Germany kids didn’t need to be picked up or dropped off, we either walked or took public transit (not dedicated school buses either). As far as I can tell that’s still the case where I live. It’s a very different urban design that facilitates it, and it results in more human lives in my opinion.
We had in elementary school this thing called “the line”. End of school day kids would gather at different recognizable points on the playground (“the basketball hoop” or such). Every point had a teacher and/or parent waiting. Then they made all kids hold hands two by two and started walking… Every line went to different corners in the neighbourhood, dropping kids off at home and even seeing they get in / someone is home… I’m pretty sure over 85% of all kids got home every day with this incredibly innovative technology… of volunteer parents. Kids that couldn’t get dropped of at home for some reason (no one home or so) continued back to school where they could play for 1 or 2 more hours until they got picked up… Didn’t realise I lived in a fairy tale land until internet times.
Especially kindergarten/elementary school should just be in the neighbourhood itself unless it’s a really really really tiny town (in which case the innovation would be called: BUS).
I live in the UK and walk my children to school every day. There is still a line for school pickup/drop-off because not everyone is so lucky.
This isn’t even an American phenomenon.
Some amount of people will be driving cars to pickup and drop-off every day, even if it’s minimized and even if it’s not always the same people.
So it stands to reason they should do it in some kind of orderly fashion as dictated by the school for the safety of, get this, THE CHILDREN ARRIVING BY FOOT, BIKE OR BUS
We’re also talking about five year olds walking 1-2 mi at the end of a long day. Older kids, fine, but 5 is pretty young. I don’t think my parents were comfortable with me walking/biking home alone until 4th grade.
There’s also plenty of other valid use cases, such as if you are taking your kid to something after school. Or they have an activity which causes them to stay late. Or you don’t want them to take the bus cause you’re already in the neighborhood and why not pick them up as a treat (when I was growing up, buses didn’t have a/c - riding in anything that didn’t have a bunch of smelly sweating kids was definitely a treat)
Even if they’re within walking range only 25% of kids walk. 50% are driven by private car, and 25% take the bus. So you literally have 50% of kids that are within walking range still getting dropped off/picked up by private vehicle.
For your other use cases, that’s why other countries use public transit rather than publicly funded school buses that only run twice a day. It’s just a massive waste of money.
Yeah the truth of the matter is, people use cars because they have them. If they didn’t have them things would be a lot different. You can see that by looking at the data on that link as well. 70% of impoverished children ride the school bus. So not only are those kids disadvantaged with money, but they’re disadvantaged with the situations you’re talking about with after school activities as well. Public transit would be better for everyone here. We wouldn’t be funding these school buses that might ride empty, taxpayer dollars would be able to be reallocated to the actual teaching in the school or even better public transit. A small portion of that would go to the impoverished or those that can’t take public transit.
It might just be possible that in a country of 300+ million people spread over 3 million square miles where each school district is operated at a local level…for two people to have had different experiences.
Either way if your parents thought 5 was old enough to get home from school by yourself, good for you I guess.
They didn’t, I walked home with a friend who lived nearby and hung out until my mom was done work. Could have taken the bus home, but they didn’t want me home alone at that age.
Also, it may not seem like it anymore, but we do have a Department of Education that could pretty easily come up with nationwide rules regarding bussing. They could even afford to subsidize it in areas with lower income. Or, you know, not make education quality a function of an area’s wealth in the first place, and just administer it all at the federal (or even just state) level.
Meanwhile we have busses that don’t always go anywhere close to everyone’s houses (or if they do, they may take multiple hours to get there after dropping off a hundred other kids), almost non-existent sidewalks in most suburbs, dumbasses who don’t watch for people on bikes, and a court system that’s regularly faulted the person on the bike for getting hit.
Greatest country!
Also, at least where I live, you have to have prior permission to ride the bus. Your parent is going to be late picking you up? Guess you’re waiting outside cause they didn’t pre sign the permission slip!
you’re getting downvoted because your numbers are drastically off. I posted a comment below, but in the US 33% of school kids are dropped off/picked up by car. Not 5%. That number jumps to 39% if you’re including those driving themselves to school. The average number of kids in school is 512 (in the USA) so that’s ~169 kids getting picked up and dropped off each day. Essentially 169 cars, maybe fewer depending on how many ride together. If the number was 5% (it’s not) then that would only be ~26 cars. Which is still a line, but not a long one.
You made up a small number to pretend like the problem isn’t as bad as it is, and now you’re using a strawman to make it seem like we would still need cars for the made up number you gave. The conversation isn’t about needing cars, it’s about having car lines due to so many cars. If it were actually as small a number as that then no, we wouldn’t have lines like this, because that’s about the rate that developed european countries have for pickup/dropoff car rates. And those people are the ones telling you it’s not a problem in their country.
Yeah… Because I was steel Manning this argument lol, not strawmanning it.
I was saying EVEN IF it were the case that we lived in an enlightened near carless society, there’s going to be some people who arrive via car, and apparently having an organized and safe way to accomodate that is sacreliege here.
Ask yourself if you seriously think I was making the argument that, in America specifically, 95% of the time 95% of people are not using cars to arrive at school.
Then ask yourself, if you thought that was the argument I was making, are you mentally equipped to carry on this conversation.
Well in my country if a parent comes picking up their kids by car they have to park their car and walk to the school to pick their kids up. Waiting in your idling car in front of the school while taking up the lane is not allowed.
Yeah that’s why places that routinely have some car pick up come up with ways to manage it, like having dedicated pickup lanes to move parents and children through quickly safely and efficiently.
And just like that you turn even more area around a school into child-unsafe asphalt wasteland, facilitate the private car pick-up further and thus encourage even more people to do the less good way of how to get kids to school. Sometimes fixing a “problem” only creates more, bigger problems. This is one of those times.
It’s not a criticism of people participating in a shitty system and have little say in the matter. It’s a criticism of a system that forces people to make shitty decisions.
You’re never going to win against these people. They all seem to think that if they downvote people enough the economic realities of cars will shift and magically the world will change while they do literally nothing to actually change it.
When I got cut loose from 70s-80s elementary I was on my fucking own. We could walk, ride, skate, whatever. We did not require a fucking adult to care for us. Bell rings? GTFO! BYE!
When my step-son was in elementary, 20-years ago, anything outside of a bus or parent’s car was a non-starter. Fucking pathetic.
Just commenting to support and remind you upvote/downvote counts are not representative of correctness.
I’m british and although it’s easy easy to believe we all walk and get thr bus, the TRUTH is 6% of our schoolchildren have fully complete end to end transport paid by the state (yes taxis) - this is usually due to negligence of the parents.
There is a real requirement for kids to be picked up by cars and removing that option will only hurt the education of the innocent child.
People on this site are very quick to binary extremism and would immediately struggle if given power of choice over others in real world scenarios.
So now imagine 33% (car dropoff from that statistic, vs driving yourself) of your students’ parents sitting in a car line outside the school. In a school with 512 students (USA average) that is 169 cars waiting in line. In Britain, with the same school size, that would be 30 cars in line…if a line existed at all, because it looks like in Britain 9 of 10 children using the HTST program actually share the taxi so it’s only ~12 cars in line.
With these numbers you wouldn’t even notice a line, which is why many people in this thread are talking about it like it’s crazy. It’s not that nobody uses cars in other countries, it’s that it’s so insane the number of cars us Americans use.
Notably, those numbers for America don’t actually describe the full picture. If you dig down into that spreadsheet you actually see that 20% of American schools report that over 50% of students are dropped off by car each day. The survey doesn’t go any higher than that, so the actual percentage of students dropped off by car each day actually might be much much much higher than 33%. So in a full quarter of the US we have more than half the school being dropped off and picked up by car each day, and we don’t even know how high that percentage goes! Finally, 69% of schools reported that their students do not have access to public transit, so it’s not even possible to get to a state like Europe has. We do have school buses, but that’s essentially the same thing as your taxis, except even worse cause we’re paying for them for almost 90% of schools! So not only are at least 33% of students getting dropped off by car at school, but we’re still paying for private school buses for those students, even if they’re not used or needed.
So in summary: 6% is really nothing. American’s pay for 90% for school buses alone. 33% of students are still dropped off by car, even though school buses might be available. Finally, 69% of schools don’t even have access to public transit.
The statistics around walking/biking infrastructure is even more telling. 22% of schools don’t even have sidewalks to walk to the school. 59% don’t have crossing guards. 65% don’t have speed bumps or tables. 80% don’t have bike lanes.
no, I most definitely didn’t. your point was pretty clear.
There is a real requirement for kids to be picked up by cars and removing that option will only hurt the education of the innocent child.
Nobody said otherwise. This thread is about pickup lines for schools full of cars. I guarantee it’s not nearly the same problem you have in the UK. Everyone everywhere understands cars serve a purpose.
The fact that school pickup lines exist is wild.
If only there were free public transport provided to every student outside a small radius of the school. That would make things so much simpler!
Seriously, I can’t wrap my head around this. Back in my day, pickup lines simply didn’t exist. You walked or you took the bus.
We walked and biked even skied to school in the winter. Some kids had quite the journey. Now my nephew is 8 and and there are like 20 cars waiting in front of the school, or the closest they can drive. They also complained that it’s pretty dangerous because of all the traffic, not realising that they are the traffic. No car would be there without them. It’s madness.
Just gonna throw this out there, while yes car=bad and carbrain is real, sometimes its just administrative bullshit that fails to consider the realities of their student’s and/or parents’ needs and living situations.
When my kids started school, because my youngest is special needs and other specifics they both started around the same time in different grades. For the majority of the student body my town’s school district will simply bus between different schools plus a couple of specific designated points so that everyone who lives within city limits is within about half a mile of a place that the buses pick up and drop off. They require a parent/guardian present at pickup time for 3k-Kindergarten bus pickup and dropoff. For students in special ed they instead get to take the special ed bus which has extra staff and seatbelts and only picks up and drops off at the home and also requires a parent/guardian present. Both do pickups and dropoffs at about the same time. I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Since my wife has been a stay at home mom (primarily due to daycare costs exceeding what she would realistically make) and can’t be in 2 places at once[1]^ we were forced to do our own pickups and dropoffs instead of bussing. I’m sure there’s similar levels of bullshit if your kids are in different grades putting them at different schools because the local school administrators seem to be really good at not fully thinking things through like that and usually require experiencing the consequences of their actions to change course on a decision
citation needed ↩︎
You’re describing an exception, which is of course real and necessary. The vast majority of a school pickup line is simply carbrain and some vague “mama bear” bullshit.
I was going to say we don’t know for sure why so many parents choose to drive their kids, but it turns out after a quick Google that there has been at least one study into this matter, and it seems a large portion of the surveyed respondents can be attributed to carbrain (vague “stranger danger” and “risk of bullying” as listed reasons, which the bullying risk may be real or perceived but that’s hard to empirically determine) but also a significant number drive their kids due to “traffic danger” indicating that it is poor road design pushing a significant portion of parents to choose to perform school pickups and dropoffs by car. And most of the remainder drive their kids to and from school out of “social convenience” (which is probably where my specific instance falls) so based on this one study based on a survey of almost 300 parents we could actually reduce the number of cars in those lines by a significant portion by making other options than driving more convenient for parents, but a large number state they’re primarily concerned about pedestrian safety which is more of an infrastructure challenge than a direct “car brain” challenge
I really wish I was better at reading studies because that is some fascinating data that I’d love to play with some more and see what other conclusions I could tease out of it
Back in my day, the early to mid 90s, there were still pickups. There was a shorter line, it was easier, because there were fewer people.
Where I live now, and where I lived then, there was cutoffs for the bus, like a mile or more. My town now, barely anyone is a mile from anything. There’s one bus for the school, and they use it for underprivileged and disabled students. Everyone else is on their own, and so if you live a mile from school, having your four or five year old walk sometimes isn’t feasible.
We live about a mile from school. I drive halfway and park and we walk the other half, because I cannot stand the pickup line. But some people go, drop their kid, and head to work, and so it’s completely understandable that they use the pickup line.
Sometimes, the parents forget to pick up the kids so the teachers get to decide if they leave a child all alone with no help or if the teacher works unpaid over time
Greatest country in the world…
Here if parents don’t show up, teacher have to call the police to pick the kid (it almost happened to me as I was 5 min late)
I work in child care and the regulations behind this are fucked. There’s no gray area and staff risks prison time for not following them. I get how these laws and regulations get implemented. Even “good parents” will think it’s completely reasonable to be late to pick up your children. Once in a while isn’t a problem but when you are in charge of hundreds of kids and too many parents have that mentality it creates a cascade of issues for staff. (child care works have lives too) so please contact the school/facility if you are going to be late and don’t be late constantly.
Here the kids just walked or cycled home. Bus if you lived further away or didn’t wanna cycle in the winter. But I grew up in a small town in Estonia in the 00s. It may have been literally feared at the time by people not from our town, but generally nobody would hurt a 7 year old and even once you got older, usually people’s beefs were with kids from the other towns nearby, not locals.
No. Bullshit. When I got cut loose from 70s-80s elementary I was on my fucking own. We could walk, ride, skate, whatever. We did not require a fucking adult to care for us. Bell rings? GTFO! BYE!
Idk maybe teachers these days care idk
oh, they definitely don’t care about the kids. They care about getting arrested or sued.
Oh yea dude, people doing thankless low paying jobs that require the same education as jobs that pay much better are sooooo greedy and not at all passionate.
I got screwed at every step of my education. The passion gets ground out of them without them realizing.
Oh no, they’re aware. They’re especially aware of the clueless people blaming them for not getting blood from stone.
I got lied to about my placement tests for no one’s gain. I got stone walled and gaslighted every time I tried improving my situation.
The most passion I ever heard from a teacher the was a rightwing asshole in my civics class when he was complaining about immigrants or welfare queens. My science teacher had to be asked directly about climate change for him to utter his take on that.
It’s always money.
When I first moved to the town I live in now, I was impressed by the all new schools. However I eventually realized they replaced a bunch of older neighborhood schools with a smaller number of bigger schools. They saved money by providing a worse educational experience and making walking less likely.
We walked to my kids elementary school but the town saved money by not plowing the sidewalks in winter, nor forcing residents to. Our walk would require walking on a major street - until my ex went full Karen and made them plow
When my kids got to middle school, we were in “walking” distance so there was no bus. However that was a full mile including crossing a six lane road whose light was always broken, and they didn’t spring for a crossing guard . We ended up choosing a private school in a different town, so there were no buses nor walkability
Regional school districts are now common. More kids goto schools that are not even in their towns
How do you envision kids being picked up after school? Free for all?
Edit: yes I’m doubling down, the people in the replies are idiots.
Obviously walking, biking, or taking the bus is better. Let’s assume that covers 95% of children 95% of the time.
Now what?
I was asking what to do WITH CARS that are picking up kids REGARDLESS OF THE FACT THAT ANOTHER KID MIGHT TKAE THE BUS
In my childhood in Germany kids didn’t need to be picked up or dropped off, we either walked or took public transit (not dedicated school buses either). As far as I can tell that’s still the case where I live. It’s a very different urban design that facilitates it, and it results in more human lives in my opinion.
We had in elementary school this thing called “the line”. End of school day kids would gather at different recognizable points on the playground (“the basketball hoop” or such). Every point had a teacher and/or parent waiting. Then they made all kids hold hands two by two and started walking… Every line went to different corners in the neighbourhood, dropping kids off at home and even seeing they get in / someone is home… I’m pretty sure over 85% of all kids got home every day with this incredibly innovative technology… of volunteer parents. Kids that couldn’t get dropped of at home for some reason (no one home or so) continued back to school where they could play for 1 or 2 more hours until they got picked up… Didn’t realise I lived in a fairy tale land until internet times.
Especially kindergarten/elementary school should just be in the neighbourhood itself unless it’s a really really really tiny town (in which case the innovation would be called: BUS).
America’s choking to death on cars
We envision them taking a bus, walking, or biking home. Not them each getting picked up individually by their parents
When a world without cars is inconceivable, it becomes a presumed condition of the question that the answer must involve cars.
I live in the UK and walk my children to school every day. There is still a line for school pickup/drop-off because not everyone is so lucky.
This isn’t even an American phenomenon.
Some amount of people will be driving cars to pickup and drop-off every day, even if it’s minimized and even if it’s not always the same people.
So it stands to reason they should do it in some kind of orderly fashion as dictated by the school for the safety of, get this, THE CHILDREN ARRIVING BY FOOT, BIKE OR BUS
We’re also talking about five year olds walking 1-2 mi at the end of a long day. Older kids, fine, but 5 is pretty young. I don’t think my parents were comfortable with me walking/biking home alone until 4th grade.
There’s also plenty of other valid use cases, such as if you are taking your kid to something after school. Or they have an activity which causes them to stay late. Or you don’t want them to take the bus cause you’re already in the neighborhood and why not pick them up as a treat (when I was growing up, buses didn’t have a/c - riding in anything that didn’t have a bunch of smelly sweating kids was definitely a treat)
Even if they’re within walking range only 25% of kids walk. 50% are driven by private car, and 25% take the bus. So you literally have 50% of kids that are within walking range still getting dropped off/picked up by private vehicle.
For your other use cases, that’s why other countries use public transit rather than publicly funded school buses that only run twice a day. It’s just a massive waste of money.
https://www.bts.gov/topics/passenger-travel/back-school-2019
Well that’s fun data. The very bottom of the page links to the raw dataset.
This country also uses public buses in some areas. Where I grew up the school board staggered starts so the school busses are used most of the day.
Yeah the truth of the matter is, people use cars because they have them. If they didn’t have them things would be a lot different. You can see that by looking at the data on that link as well. 70% of impoverished children ride the school bus. So not only are those kids disadvantaged with money, but they’re disadvantaged with the situations you’re talking about with after school activities as well. Public transit would be better for everyone here. We wouldn’t be funding these school buses that might ride empty, taxpayer dollars would be able to be reallocated to the actual teaching in the school or even better public transit. A small portion of that would go to the impoverished or those that can’t take public transit.
2 miles would be in the bus zone.
I don’t know why people are pretending this is impossible, it’s exactly how it worked when I was in public school. In the US.
Everyone walked or took a bus. Maybe there was like one or two kids who had some sort of special circumstance that required them to get picked up.
It might just be possible that in a country of 300+ million people spread over 3 million square miles where each school district is operated at a local level…for two people to have had different experiences.
Either way if your parents thought 5 was old enough to get home from school by yourself, good for you I guess.
They didn’t, I walked home with a friend who lived nearby and hung out until my mom was done work. Could have taken the bus home, but they didn’t want me home alone at that age.
Also, it may not seem like it anymore, but we do have a Department of Education that could pretty easily come up with nationwide rules regarding bussing. They could even afford to subsidize it in areas with lower income. Or, you know, not make education quality a function of an area’s wealth in the first place, and just administer it all at the federal (or even just state) level.
So…you just had a personal pick-up line at your friend’s house?
We walked home from school. What happened after that is irrelevant. Especially if we’re talking about car-heavy infrastructure surrounding the school.
Meanwhile we have busses that don’t always go anywhere close to everyone’s houses (or if they do, they may take multiple hours to get there after dropping off a hundred other kids), almost non-existent sidewalks in most suburbs, dumbasses who don’t watch for people on bikes, and a court system that’s regularly faulted the person on the bike for getting hit.
Greatest country!
Also, at least where I live, you have to have prior permission to ride the bus. Your parent is going to be late picking you up? Guess you’re waiting outside cause they didn’t pre sign the permission slip!
Ok that’s lovely. And the ones who are being picked up individually by their parents? They don’t wait in a line?
Why would they, there’s like five of them…
I’m sure you can imagine how if there were more then 5 that could become a problem right?
I suppose you are also capable of imagining schools other than your own?
you’re getting downvoted because your numbers are drastically off. I posted a comment below, but in the US 33% of school kids are dropped off/picked up by car. Not 5%. That number jumps to 39% if you’re including those driving themselves to school. The average number of kids in school is 512 (in the USA) so that’s ~169 kids getting picked up and dropped off each day. Essentially 169 cars, maybe fewer depending on how many ride together. If the number was 5% (it’s not) then that would only be ~26 cars. Which is still a line, but not a long one.
You made up a small number to pretend like the problem isn’t as bad as it is, and now you’re using a strawman to make it seem like we would still need cars for the made up number you gave. The conversation isn’t about needing cars, it’s about having car lines due to so many cars. If it were actually as small a number as that then no, we wouldn’t have lines like this, because that’s about the rate that developed european countries have for pickup/dropoff car rates. And those people are the ones telling you it’s not a problem in their country.
https://programming.dev/post/39823707/20229448
At no point have I made up any numbers not strawmanned anything in this conversation. Piss off
your words
Yeah… Because I was steel Manning this argument lol, not strawmanning it.
I was saying EVEN IF it were the case that we lived in an enlightened near carless society, there’s going to be some people who arrive via car, and apparently having an organized and safe way to accomodate that is sacreliege here.
Ask yourself if you seriously think I was making the argument that, in America specifically, 95% of the time 95% of people are not using cars to arrive at school.
Then ask yourself, if you thought that was the argument I was making, are you mentally equipped to carry on this conversation.
Well in my country if a parent comes picking up their kids by car they have to park their car and walk to the school to pick their kids up. Waiting in your idling car in front of the school while taking up the lane is not allowed.
Yeah that’s why places that routinely have some car pick up come up with ways to manage it, like having dedicated pickup lanes to move parents and children through quickly safely and efficiently.
And just like that you turn even more area around a school into child-unsafe asphalt wasteland, facilitate the private car pick-up further and thus encourage even more people to do the less good way of how to get kids to school. Sometimes fixing a “problem” only creates more, bigger problems. This is one of those times.
All of England seems to manage it fine
I envision walkable communities
Yes that would be lovely, until then though? We don’t bother having queues or rules because Reddit doesn’t think anyone should have a car?
“You’re not allowed to criticize the status quo unless your solution can be done instantaneously”
This is a strawman argument
It’s not a criticism of people participating in a shitty system and have little say in the matter. It’s a criticism of a system that forces people to make shitty decisions.
Ever heard of a thing called a school bus
Yes, that doesn’t look like a school bus to me though. I assume if he tried to use the school bus lane they’d manage to catch him.
Get rid of this car oriented school design and make walking and biking viable again. Also school buses
Because other countries exist?
I used to walk to school, later bike to school, went to school in a bus etc.
Only times I got picked up/dropped off was when I was sick or had issues with other modes of transport
What country are you assuming I’m assuming exactly? Wasn’t aware there was only one country with both schools and cars
You’re never going to win against these people. They all seem to think that if they downvote people enough the economic realities of cars will shift and magically the world will change while they do literally nothing to actually change it.
I’m American and just commented:
When my step-son was in elementary, 20-years ago, anything outside of a bus or parent’s car was a non-starter. Fucking pathetic.
Just commenting to support and remind you upvote/downvote counts are not representative of correctness.
I’m british and although it’s easy easy to believe we all walk and get thr bus, the TRUTH is 6% of our schoolchildren have fully complete end to end transport paid by the state (yes taxis) - this is usually due to negligence of the parents.
There is a real requirement for kids to be picked up by cars and removing that option will only hurt the education of the innocent child.
People on this site are very quick to binary extremism and would immediately struggle if given power of choice over others in real world scenarios.
I think the point others are making is that 6% is essentially nothing. In America it’s 39%. That is just percentage using cars to go to school. Not using public funds at all. https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data/info-gallery/modes-transportation-available-and-used-students
So now imagine 33% (car dropoff from that statistic, vs driving yourself) of your students’ parents sitting in a car line outside the school. In a school with 512 students (USA average) that is 169 cars waiting in line. In Britain, with the same school size, that would be 30 cars in line…if a line existed at all, because it looks like in Britain 9 of 10 children using the HTST program actually share the taxi so it’s only ~12 cars in line.
With these numbers you wouldn’t even notice a line, which is why many people in this thread are talking about it like it’s crazy. It’s not that nobody uses cars in other countries, it’s that it’s so insane the number of cars us Americans use.
Notably, those numbers for America don’t actually describe the full picture. If you dig down into that spreadsheet you actually see that 20% of American schools report that over 50% of students are dropped off by car each day. The survey doesn’t go any higher than that, so the actual percentage of students dropped off by car each day actually might be much much much higher than 33%. So in a full quarter of the US we have more than half the school being dropped off and picked up by car each day, and we don’t even know how high that percentage goes! Finally, 69% of schools reported that their students do not have access to public transit, so it’s not even possible to get to a state like Europe has. We do have school buses, but that’s essentially the same thing as your taxis, except even worse cause we’re paying for them for almost 90% of schools! So not only are at least 33% of students getting dropped off by car at school, but we’re still paying for private school buses for those students, even if they’re not used or needed.
So in summary: 6% is really nothing. American’s pay for 90% for school buses alone. 33% of students are still dropped off by car, even though school buses might be available. Finally, 69% of schools don’t even have access to public transit.
The statistics around walking/biking infrastructure is even more telling. 22% of schools don’t even have sidewalks to walk to the school. 59% don’t have crossing guards. 65% don’t have speed bumps or tables. 80% don’t have bike lanes.
oh you misunderstood my comment completely.
no, I most definitely didn’t. your point was pretty clear.
Nobody said otherwise. This thread is about pickup lines for schools full of cars. I guarantee it’s not nearly the same problem you have in the UK. Everyone everywhere understands cars serve a purpose.