I’ve seen this 2015 documentary of some sort from the perspective of Japanese vs Australian kids being able to commute to and from school on their own without parental supervision. The thing is that parents in Japan encourage kids to be independent from a young age without being “babied” too much while apparently in Australia it’s common for parents to drop kids at school.
Now: why is it common for American parents to either drop kids off themselves or kids using the stereotypical yellow school buses on commuting to school rather than letting the kid use public transport themselves or walk to school on foot on their own? I’ve heard that a father got arrested in the US just for letting his son walk to and from school due to accusations of “child endangerment”.
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 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.
Americans also don’t want to smell the poor
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
Long distances, bad public transit, death spiral.
On an optimistic note, I think ebikes might actually change this. If we allow them that is.
IMO e-bikes are not safe for young kids to be riding without supervision.
Highschool, sure. But i did see a kid (probably twelve to fourteen) smash into the side of a cyber truck (to be clear the CT was stopped at a stop sign. Kid hit them blasting around a blind corner.)
The kid was only going 25 or so, but that’s fast enough, and from what I saw if he lives, it’s going to have a new normal.
ebikes are safer than snow machines and four wheelers, which plenty of Alaska has kids riding
I’m not sure “Alaska does it” is the argument you think it is.
First, I imagine there’s a vast difference between someplace like Anchorage and some of the more remote villages- both in the necessity and in the amount of traffic they’d be driving in.
Secondly, Alaska’s population is only ~750k. This is comparable to Minneapolis and St Paul combined (~450k and 300k). The only states less populated are Montana and Wyoming.
Finally, they might be safer; but that doesn’t necessarily make them safe. I doubt that we even have the necessary data to make that claim… at least in the context of sending kids across the US to school on E-bikes.
Pedal assist ebikes, for high school age, 20 mph cap. Throttle control ebike should be banned imo.
There are a lot of different places in the US
Yeah it wouldn’t surprise me if the US had more kids that walk to school than Japan since we simply have like 5x more children here.
Because of stranger danger
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.
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.
I grew up 3 miles outside of town on a highway. I rode the school bus.
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.
