Ngchen

According to (https://www.epa.gov/epahome/enviroq/index.htm), 20% of US weekday morning traffic is kids being driven to school. And the irony is that the resulting congestion causes even more people to drive their kids to school. All the idling is extra bad as well, being extra polluting relative even to cars in general.

Now, I'm wondering what percentage of elementary school kids live within 1 mi of school, and the percentage of middle/high school kids within 1.5 mi of school. (These numbers are from a typical "transport yourself" responsibility zone.) Assuming a walking speed of 3 mi/hr, that translates to a 1 hr r/t commute for the kids.

If we translated the middle/high school kids commute to cycling times, then we would have a radius of circa 5 mi (assuming a modest 10 mi/hr speed - can't expect the kids to be athletes). Now what's percentage of kids would fit the circumstances?

With all the talk of kids not being sufficiently active, a reasonable policy would be to build the sidewalks and BLs to make it eminently reasonable for the kids to commute to/from school. Not to mention the reduction in traffic and pollution, and resources ultimately saved if the percentage of kids falling under these categories is non-negligible.

genec

yeah but then you have to get past the spiral of who sends their kids unescorted to school first...

ItsJustMe

We live 5 miles from school, and I'm not driving my kids to school. I rode the bus through my senior year, and they can too. My daughter has already graduated and rode the bus the whole time.

I only drive them to school if there's something going on - band practice, or they have a big project that needs to be carried in.

A friend actually was called by the vice-principal for having her kid walk about a mile to school - he called it child endangerment and said he'd call CPS on her if she did it again. They live a mile away, there are very safe sidewalks the whole way with only one road crossing, with a light and pedestrian lights.

Pathetic.

unterhausen

It's pretty bad. We were in a hurry to buy a house and our location is less than ideal. But there is a shortage of places in town with good access to many of the schools. There is one middle school here in a large development, but I've never been there to see how many kids are being dropped off. The middle school my son goes to is off by itself and to get to it from most areas requires crossing two fairly dangerous roads. One is 5 lanes wide with no accommodation for pedestrians and it's not uncommon to see people driving over 60 mph. We are certainly less than 1.5 miles from his school. On the rare occasion when we do drop him off, the traffic is intense. I agree that it feeds on itself -- I don't think I would want to walk to my son's school myself, I'd be concerned if he wanted to walk there.

AlmostTrick

In my suburban neighborhood several kids get driven to the bus stop. Ours is a small neighborhood, where no one would have had more than a tenth of a mile walk. There's one parent that parks in front of my house everyday, idles and waits for the bus, and then returns home three houses away, literally 300 feet at best! Go America!

mikeybikes

Isn't that just disgusting? And we wonder why there's such a childhood obesity epidemic.

wahoonc

We have a cluster of 3 schools about 1.5 miles from our house. There are multiple neighborhoods within a 3 mile radius of these schools. They are all but inaccessible by walking. They were built on a narrow 45mph posted road with no sidewalks or even shoulders! There have been at least 3 people killed walking along this road in the past 2 years.

Small wonder people drive their kids to school....

Aaron

unterhausen

I'm guilty of driving the kids to the bus stop when they were younger. It's not for the walking, more for the weather. The bus seems to have extremely variable timing when the weather is bad. A lot of people around here drive their kids to the bus stop because they'd have to be stopped along a crazy fast road. Now, why they wait until the bus has been stopped a while to kick the kid out of the car, that I couldn't tell you. We tried to get the bus to go down our street so the kids wouldn't have to be out on a high speed road, no joy on that.

DX-MAN

Over the years, most of the kids' school transport was the bus; there was one stepchild who couldn't GET a bus ride, the bus route wasn't anywhere close, and it was just as quick and easy to drop her off. That lasted one school year.

Where my daughter and my sister's youngest boy go to school is right at 2 miles away; the only reason they don't ride their own bikes is because I can't escort them home in the PM. So they get the bus.

The hyperbole about child predators has made this society into a nanny institution; there's no such thing as a safe child outside the sightline of a designated responsible adult. I'm the same way with my daughter. SHE won't walk a mile to/from school unescorted, either, CPS be damned.

I wonder what these self-important 'parents' would do if the schools would: a.)restrict the number of vehicles allowed on school grounds at any one time; and b.) offer the 'blueprints' of car-pooling for kids' transport to school... y'know, tell 'em how it could be done. Might it not 'force' parents to get to know one another?

Laserman

The "Helicopter Parent" phenomenon is probably a reaction the continuous media onslaught of bad news.
Local news outlets in particular like stories that could cause a gullible person to believe there is a serial killer or pedophile lurking behind every tree and bush.
Of course parents want their kids to be safe but many take to extremes.

ItsJustMe

Very true, and sad given that there's actually less crime directed towards children now than there ever has been before; it's just that when something does happen, the entire country hears about it for a week.

What is true though is that we continue to design cities to be more and more dangerous to people who are not encased in a protective steel cage. In fact, they're more and more dangerous even to those who ARE in a cage.

lubes17319

A good visual of this effect can be seen in 'The Woman Who Stops Traffic' show. They show the school parkings before/during her car-free day & what a difference it makes - mainly in the safety to the children walking to/from their parents' vehicles.

jfmckenna

That is seriously pathetic.

genec

Yup, gonna grow little rolly polly kids.

Just saw a report on Yahoo yesterday that was talking about how the Army has just changed their training to compensate for the rolly polly video game generation... they now are doing core exercises to get these little butterballs into some sort of physical shape so they don't hurt themselves getting in and out the Humvees. Sigh.

Feldman

1. Tolerate the periodic lynching of child predators, 2.Very heavy-handed enforcement of very low speed limits within 1K of schools, arterial streets included.

Ngchen

In terms of low speed limits around schools, I wonder if it's possible to build speed humps that can be set on a timer. School-zone speed time, everything slows to 15-25 mph, normal speed otherwise.

ghettocruiser

March break here.

In the usual school-mayhem zone, you could hear a pin drop.



No, it didn't fall out of my chain.

DX-MAN

I'm good with that!

Bobby Sixkiller

It's possible, but the cost to build and maintain it would be substantial. I doubt many school districts or municipalities would have the budget to invent, design, build, and maintain modular speed humps on timers. It would be less expensive to do speed enforcement via local police during those hours.

wahoonc

Yes, I have seen something similar in use in Germany. There is also a version that was being built in Mexico that can sense the speed of a vehicle and popup when the car is going too fast. It would be very easy to add a timer to the sensing circuits. IIRC the Mexican version was ~$600 a speed hump for a fully automatic one.

Aaron

nelson249

I am surprised that it is only 20%. Being March break, my commute is infinitely better this week than normal. Of course, I live next to a suburban high school which distorts things a little bit. The worst aspect is not necessarily the parents dropping their kids off but rather the school/transit buses which serve the school.

Doohickie

...if not more. This week is Spring Break week here. Traffic is like a ghost town.

Doohickie

Welcome to Texas!

noisebeam

Clearly the solution is to get rid of schools.

Bobby Sixkiller

Are you serious? Is that $600 adjusted for what it would cost to construct in the US, or is that the nominal cost of the product in Mexico? I can't imagine a similar device constructed in the US would be less than $10K.