We envision them taking a bus, walking, or biking home. Not them each getting picked up individually by their parents
Comment on School pickup lines are wild
TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca 1 day agoHow do you envision kids being picked up after school? Free for all?
Stez827@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
cRazi_man@europe.pub 1 day ago
When a world without cars is inconceivable, it becomes a presumed condition of the question that the answer must involve cars.
TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca 1 day ago
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
balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one 9 hours ago
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.
tyler@programming.dev 4 hours ago
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.
balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one 2 hours ago
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.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 hours ago
1-2 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.
balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one 8 hours ago
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.
kboy101222@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
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!
TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Ok that's lovely. And the ones who are being picked up individually by their parents? They don't wait in a line?
needanke@feddit.org 22 hours ago
Why would they, there’s like five of them…
TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca 22 hours ago
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?
tyler@programming.dev 5 hours ago
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.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca 1 day ago
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.
freebee@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
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.
TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca 12 hours ago
All of England seems to manage it fine
Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
I envision walkable communities
TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca 1 day ago
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?
Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net 22 hours ago
Yes that would be lovely, until then though?
“You’re not allowed to criticize the status quo unless your solution can be done instantaneously”
because Reddit doesn’t think anyone should have a car?
This is a strawman argument
howrar@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
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.
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ever heard of a thing called a school bus
TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca 1 day ago
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.
balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one 9 hours ago
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.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Get rid of this car oriented school design and make walking and biking viable again. Also school buses
copd@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
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.
tyler@programming.dev 5 hours ago
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. bts.gov/…/modes-transportation-available-and-used…
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.
copd@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
oh you misunderstood my comment completely.
shalafi@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I’m American and just commented:
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.
fatboy93@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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
TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca 1 day ago
What country are you assuming I’m assuming exactly? Wasn’t aware there was only one country with both schools and cars
baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
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.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
America’s choking to death on cars
freebee@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
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).