No Stupid Questions

Public transport? What’s that?

• Most of the us doesn’t have functional public transport
• as a single datapoint, kids in Boston public schools get t passes. I don’t know if it’s some or all but a coworker had her kids get to school on their own using transit, with passes provided by the school system
• I live in an older suburb of Boston, and my kids walked to school. However it was falling to the same disease as so many suburbs: neighborhood schools closing into fewer and much larger ones across town.

I grew up 3 miles outside of town on a highway. I rode the school bus.

Because our public transit is terrible in just places, and it's not viewed as safe enough to send children on. If it's technically walking distance then the other can be that it's often along very busy roads without actual sidewalks. Schools also often start before the sun comes up, which exacerbates the issue for walking.

Living in Seattle I have seen children (mostly teenagers) taking the light rail to school, so it's not unheard of.

I walked back and forth from home to school all throughout fifth grade to about middle school, unsupervised. This was also in the 70s and 80s, before parents were paranoid about such things.

Literally no one at my schools walked there. I personally lived 9.5 km from my high school which is the closest high school by a long shot. The school district (and its only high school) served a 440+ square km area, so I wasn’t even on the far end of things. Only the very last bit of getting there would have sidewalks. (A majority of the walk would be along roads like this https://maps.app.goo.gl/MfAsP2SJgVTmnEzu5?g_st=ic ). At least a mile of the walk (which my parents did let me do from 8years on) is unmaintained dirt road.

Oh and at the start of the school year, it’s not unusual that the temp is 31 c.

Most of this continent was built by racists who owned car companies. Turns out racists that own car companies really wanna make sure that everyone has to drive and black kids stay away from white kids, and then they build cities to make those things happen.

Depends on where you live. What’s common in NYC won’t be common in Little Rock Arkansas.

Often older cities were designed around neighbor streets surrounding schools and parks. Kids would and still do walk to school in these places.

New suburban houses often have developer designed or covenant communities (HOAs) that were built as a unit, sometimes gated, and focus on selling lots not building schools. Often in these communities schools are built as part of an education complex meaning carpools and busses. These schools may be near a highway meaning 4th graders are not crossing 6 lanes of traffic.

Like everything in life. It depends. Often suburban clusters will pop up in the counties before municipal services catch up. Car culture pushes cities and services farther and farther away.

Most places in the us do not bave functional public transport. In New York, I believe, it’s not uncommon for schools to use the public transit network instead.

Most of my friends in school lived 10+ miles from school, and figure walking a 10 minute mile, crossing who knows how many dangerous roads.

So our solution is the yellow school bus. Public transport for kids to get to school and get back home on time; with only a minimal amount of walking (which is super important here because it’s cold enough in winter kids can die in minutes.)

It may not make sense, but it kinda works?

My journey to high school would have been a multi-hour one-way walk down a road without sidewalks for most of the way with speed limits of 80+ kph depending upon where.

Middle school wasn't much better that had slightly more sidewalks once reaching the edge of town (the highschool was, at the time, mostly surrounded by fields in another area outside of town).

I did go to one school for 3 years that was 5-6km away on ~50 kph road also with no sidewalk, poor visibility, etc. but that also would have been dangerous for someone 8-10 years old.

My kindergarten and first 3 years of primary school were about just as bad. I actually lived further away in another direction during that time.

I grew up in a rural area and nearly everyone rode the bus. My bus ride was about 45 minutes each way. I wasn't THAT far from the school, but the bus went down every side street dripping off kids between my house and the school.

Where I live now, only a small percentage of kids ride the bus. Most have to walk.

None of this applies to all places necessarily:

Large distances in rural areas.

Stranger danger.

Everything is car focused in the US. The famous sentence "It's 5 minutes on foot, let's walk there." has never been uttered.

Public transport may be shit or not suitably safe/reliable to get kids to school.

Big yellow buses have become a default, a cultural cornerstone, and many people rely on it and expect it.

Long traffic jams at schools are the sign of a more affluent population in the district.

The infrastructure for it doesn't really exist. Kids in Japan don't have to walk on the highway to get to school.

Those of us whose kids can commute on our own, take it for granted.

Taking a real example (but not exactly where I live): 916 Clearview Dr in South Carolina has a nearby school that is a two-minute drive and about 16-minute walk. However, most of the way there doesn't have any sidewalks, so kids can't walk safely (which means there will be very few crossing guards), and the cars only have stop signs. Some of the areas that are passed are very run down and may have gang activity (which makes it unsafe for the kids). There might also not be any school buses as they could be considered too close, or the area doesn't have the funding.

We also can't forget about the parents as they may have a tight schedule and it's better for them to drive (ensuring both the kids get to school, and they get to work).

Long distances, bad public transit, death spiral.

On an optimistic note, I think ebikes might actually change this. If we allow them that is.

There are a lot of different places in the US

In my part of town, there is a local highway we have to cross to get to school. As there is no crossing guard, I will go walk them. This walk us like ten minutes, no problem. However, once kids go to the other schools in town the walk goes from 10 to 30 minutes easily. Since the kids still have to cross that highway that no one cars to safely stop, we have to drive the kids. So in this case, poor driving skills and poor pedestrian safety is why.

Where I grew up a bus was needed as the schools were too far away to walk.

Well, I would frequently walk or bike to school in jr high. Did it a few times in high school. Never in elementary.

The walk for me as a half hour, and it's only halfway across town. No sidewalks through most of it, residential neighborhoods but moderate traffic as people are going to work (or school). Never had any significant incidents, and knew plenty of people along the route I could have sought help from.

Now? No way would I let my kid walk to the same school. More traffic, more assholery, and kids just aren't treated the same when they're walking alone. It isn't even about risk per se. The area is populated enough, with enough adults around, to make anything but really fast snatches improbable. That was always a risk.

It's about the reality of what a kid in their tweens is going to see and hear. The kind of perfectly legal but unacceptable bullshit they'll run into. Assholes of all ages, everywhere. I trained my kid the handle most things, but they shouldn't have to.

And the walk to the high school is over twice as far. So even after the extra development might give a kid the ability to handle the shit, there's more chances for it to happen.

And it sucks. I had freedom to explore my town. To get the exercise, the sense of community from waving to and being waved at. But nowadays? Too many assholes. Even if I was able bodied again, I wouldn't fucking walk the same route, armed and trained as I am. That last part less because I'd be worried about someone fucking with me, more that I'm a grumpy old fuck and might not keep myself as restrained as I used to.

I wish like hell my kid could have had that experience, but those days are gone. With the added bullshit of the nanny state deciding that walking on public streets isn't safe and that's somehow the parents' fault, it wasn't worth or, and I don't see that changing until we have a cultural shift back to having a sense of community and connectedness. We don't have to like each other, but we do need to watch out for each other, and that's harder to find than it used to be just 40ish years ago.

Because of stranger danger

In some places it’s iffy legally leaving kids home alone, so because of that I assume many parents also just do the commuting part with them to be safe. There are also many places that are not built to just let kids or bike to school.