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Comment by ndjskska | Hacker News Reader

In Germany we're assigned to the nearest school.

I remember walking to school in elementary school, later taking the bike for 20 min or public transportation. I don't live in a particularly dense area.

Is Boston too sparsely populated to have schools in walking or biking distance?

Seems that we accept distances of 1-2 km for elementary school walks. (0.6 to 1.2 miles)

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Boston is different from this in a whole variety of ways.

1) Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia.

2) Boston's transportation system is broken on just about every levels. The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths. The public transit system was also built in an ad-hoc and is at level where full transit lines stop for days at a time. So all that's left is driving, though Boston drivers have a terrible reputation too!

3) Boston's weather is also miserable - the place is at just latitude so that wet, 30 degree weather prevails in winter, giving freezing rain, frozen rain, slush and all manner of nastiness. Plus horrible hot, humid summers. So you have to avoid walking a lot.

4) Boston experienced court-order busing to end segregation in the 1970s, so it's often true that students aren't in schools closest to them geographically.

Isn't Boston's climate very similar to most of Germany's?

And maybe the street layout?

Nothing special to see from an European point of view...

Huh? Is Boston not the classic car-oriented USA city?

no, too old for that (at least central boston).

When I visited I found transport to be very european compared to other US cities I have visited.

Yes and no. It's famously congested and challenging to drive in--one of the most expensive road infrastructure projects in the US ever (the "Big Dig") notwithstanding. But the downtown core as well as large parts of the adjacent Cambridge are actually pretty walkable and the public transit, subway in particular, is pretty decent. (Regular users rightly complain a lot about it, especially in winter, but then thats true of most cities including in Europe.)

I live about an hour outside of Boston and have to go in for a few days later this week and I'll be taking public transit.

Thank you, I was sure I heard about these massive congestion. I'm happy that the situation there is different than in the rest of US.

No, it's not. Most of the city, and close in suburbs like Cambridge and Somerville, were built before cars. This is one of the few places in the US where I'm happy living without a car.

No... I've never took my car into Boston when I've visited, I've always dumped the car at the train station.

One thing I have learned from reading (and occasionally taking part in) these discussions is that no, it is not. The US is different. It is too big, too small, too densely populated, too sparsely populated, too hot, too cold, too dry and too humid for anything to work. It does not matter if something appears to work most everywhere else. It will not work anywhere in the US.

A bit cynical, but not unfair. Many people in the US persistently cling to the idea that solution implemented and working (albeit imperfectly) in other parts of the world will not work in the US due to XYZ.

Which in a way, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Solutions implemented in the rest of the world will not work in the US because most people don't believe they will, or that the US is not capable of radical change (that is, radical change not driven by an individual or a corporate desire for profit)

Well I mean comparing US to individual European countries usually ignores the fact that most of the countries quoted have homogenous population with numbers closer to large US cities like New York than the entire US. If you compare US to EU you see that EU is less rosy with it's own underdeveloped regions that and the difference between richest and poorest country in EU is probably worse than the difference between states in US, relocating between states in US is simpler, etc. etc. Also decision making at EU level Europe is waay harder than the US. So instead of talking US in aggregate why not do those changes state level where it makes sense - just like they are done in the Europe.

Ironically, it is actually hotter, it is actually colder, it's all of those things you sarcastically point out. Except being too small or dense, who told you that?

I'm from the American Midwest and I'm currently in Northern Europe. The difference is huge. The density issue of American suburbs is real, and the phenomenon is relatively rare globally. Go check out Google Earth. How do you not see it?

The weather is also more extreme in most places of the US than Europe. When Europeans tell people in Wisconsin to "just take an electric scooter to the metro station" they understandably laugh it off as ridiculous.

That's true for the Midwest but not necessarily for Boston. The temperature range is a bit larger in Boston but German cities can also have >100F weeks in summer and several weeks of snow in winter.

Snow is fine, but Boston will get 3 feet of snow, then an hour of freezing rain, and the next day it will be 45F. Winter is chaos

And that situation would literally just be business as usual in somewhere like Bangor or Buffalo. In Boston it's an excuse for half the city to call out of work and the MBTA to run trains "whenever we get around to it".

It's probably not much of a factor any longer but, for many years after the "Blizzard of '78", everyone knew someone who had to be evacuated from Route 128 or who got stuck at work for a week. A decade or so later I remember a friend who had moved to Boston recently remarking to me that they had never seen a northern city where people were so paranoid when the first snowflake fell.

It definitely created a mindset of really wanting to get home (or just staying there in the first place) if any amount of snow was forecast. Of course, it doesn't help that traffic is pretty bad even in nominal conditions. Every few years you still end up with a 6 hour commute home situation for many people.

In Bangor or Buffalo there is very little "business as usual". Boston is far more dense and optimized with less slack in the system.

I bet that the activity in Boston when it is "shut down" due to weather is still busier than an average day in Bangor or Buffalo.

Both those towns are small fries compared to Boston. Why not compare it to the Arctic?

Boston in particular is full of people who think the weather is super extreme in the winter. It's mostly a cultural identity thing with a side of massholes being pansies. It's probably easier to pander to them than to tell them they're wrong.

Source: masshole who has has lived in places with harsher climates

Europe is warmed by certain climate processes in the ocean, its indeed possible that a more northerly latitude like England or Iceland can in fact have less bad winter weather due to ocean currents. The Boston area does have more consistent solar illumination due to its southerly position, FWIW, so USA isn't all bad.

in other words those associated with the automobile industry and/or are anti middle class don’t want people to build a pedestrian friendly city.

Boston is at 42.3601 N longitude, which is actually pretty far south-ish compared to Germany.

For comparison, Munich, Germany is 48.1351° N, Barcelona, Spain is 41.3851° N

Due to the ocean currents, i.e. cold water coming from the North on the US East coast, and hot water coming back from the South on the European West coast, it does not make much sense to compare latitude on the 2 sides of the Atlantic.

Famously(?) New York is at the same latitude that Naples, they definitely don't have the same climate.

Longitude in itself doesn't dictate weather. Labrador is the same longitude as London but we don't have similar climates.

Köppen climate classification is probably the best indicator of where else is similar; which comes out as the same as most of northern Europe [1].

1. https://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather-summary.php3?s=9...

You mean latitude.

You're absolutely right (we both meant that)

Latitude doesn't, you're right, though the map on the site you linked shows broad-strokes correlation, and I've found it helpful if I guess imprecise in illustrating general temperature differences.

The difference in summers - cool summer vs hot summer - is a big one, and I'd suggest that it makes Boston's climate not really the same as most of northern Europe. We haven't traditionally needed air conditioning in Germany, for example, while I understand Boston and New England (the upper mid-Atlantic and New York, surely, when I lived and visited there) come to rely on it during the summer months to not just live in puddles of sweat.

Yes, as a European, I’m always amazed at how far south the northern US and even southern Canada really is.

With that said, those are latitudes, not longitudes.

>>With that said, those are latitudes, not longitudes.

Someone once told be a simple way to remember the difference. Longitude and latitude was first used be Greeks to travel the Mediterranean ocean (not sure if that is true, but helps with remembering); The Mediterranean ocean is long from East to West, so moving in the long direction changes the longitude.

I was taught that latitude lines resemble the rungs of a ladder ("lat"-er, I suppose), or alternatively that longitude lines are all equally long.

My middle school geography teacher had a more memorable (to me) approach: lat = fat, so if you think of a fat person, their belt is the equator and latitude lines run parallel to it. Long = long hair, so if the Earth is positioned north-up, the hair (longitude lines) runs from top to bottom.

I was taught think "longitude = long hair."

That makes no sense. I’m in Atlanta but I’m pretty close to Saudi Arabia if you put the US over Europe. I can tell you I don’t live in a desert.

Chicago is comparable to Rome yet Rome rarely sees snow or the very cold windy weather Chicago is known for. You’re ignoring the whole jet stream.

It does look rainier than Munich, say: https://www.weather2travel.com/weather-comparison/?placename...

> 1) Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia.

Is it true that in some places this paranoia has gotten so far that you’ll get reported to child services if you let your kids walk to school?

> 3) Boston's weather is also miserable - the place is at just latitude so that wet, 30 degree weather prevails in winter, giving freezing rain, frozen rain, slush and all manner of nastiness. Plus horrible hot, humid summers. So you have to avoid walking a lot.

In Slovenia, same latitude as Montreal, I walked to school and back every day for 16 years. Yes even college.

What’s the problem with walking a kilometer or two in ... weather? Sometimes it rains, sometimes it snows, slush in spring, hot in summer ... so what? Just dress appropriately.

I have fond memories of early spring where you walk to school in a winter jacket and back from school in a t-shirt jacket in hand.

> What’s the problem with walking a kilometer or two

Where I grew up in New Jersey I lived 2 miles (3.2 KM) from school and I was considered close to the school. Those who lived within a 10-20 minute walk would walk. Many of us who lived further away would rely on the bus.

Edit: And this was for elementary and middle school (up to age 13). From ages 14-18 everyone was significantly further away.

Assuming you were in a city rather than a rural area, is it because US school are larger & fewer? Nowhere in my hometown (250k mid-sized city) is more than 10-15 minutes walk from a school.

New Jersey doesn't have cities that large.

I was curious so I checked. According to Wikipedia we've two over 250k and 7 over 100k!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

> is it because US school are larger & fewer

I don't know because I know very little about schools outside the US. My best guess would be that they vary everywhere and this isn't US specific.

> Assuming you were in a city rather than a rural area

Before I was born and when I was younger there were quite a few farms, but I didn't grow up with them. So I suppose it used to be rural and now is a suburb (in-between rural and a city). My town has about ~30k people.

There are a lot of sprawling cities (and I _think_ Boston may be one of those) where it would also be greater distances to walk to a school. ..so I'm not sure being a city is correlated to short walking distances to school.

3.2km isn’t that much, I had from age 10 on a 4.5km way to school, and we all would just cycle there, even during storms or with snow, or in 41°C heat, all year.

> Is it true that in some places this paranoia has gotten so far that you’ll get reported to child services if you let your kids walk to school?

Not really. There have been cases of this (well, with young children walking with older siblings to a neighborhood playground), but they are rare and sensationalized.

>The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths.

Isn't thus true of any European city?

Not any, many were rebuilt after bombings in WW2. Even so, Germany is known for splendid trains, meanwhile Bostons trains are notoriously bad. My old company was off the red line and numerous employees were delayed at least once a week due to the red line sucking.

You'll find people who regularly use public transit in many European cities complaining about their transit systems too. Boston isn't great, especially in the winter. (I used to have to use it on a regular basis.) But if I'm being fair Boston isn't "notoriously bad" unless you're setting the bar at the level of a relative handful of world cities.

While many European cities were substantially rebuilt after WW2, the existing layout was usually retained.

Boston and metro Boston also have a pretty high population density, so it doesn't help that early roads were laid out by cud chewing surveyors.

>Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia.

This is really just an upper middle class thing.

>The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths. The public transit system was also built in an ad-hoc and is at level where full transit lines stop for days at a time. So all that's left is driving, though Boston drivers have a terrible reputation too!

The smallest streets are haphazard. The big stuff was all planned out to make the overall system function well, got 80% done then some special interests kicked money to the right politicians and they stopped progress at 85%. Ditto for the subway. Every couple decades they come up with a grand plan to make it not suck then special interests compromise it out of existence. Boston drivers are fine once you've been there long enough to understand the unwritten rules. If you're naive and think you can follow the letter of the law you will have a bad time.

>Boston's weather is also miserable - the place is at just latitude so that wet, 30 degree weather prevails in winter, giving freezing rain, frozen rain, slush and all manner of nastiness. Plus horrible hot, humid summers. So you have to avoid walking a lot.

The weather is fine. Kids are much more tolerant of weather extremes than their white collar parents (the ones who dominate the debate over this kind of thing) who's days are spent in three different climate controlled boxes (house/apartment, car, office). If you do it every day it's really not a big deal.

> Is Boston too sparsely populated to have schools in walking or biking distance?

Boston is reasonably dense, but it's also defacto segregated, with parts of the city having different racial and class makeup. If we went back to neighborhood schools that people walked to that would mean effectively resegregating the schools.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_cr...

So Boston combats segregation by making children commute for longer ?

Does that also apply to privileged families ? (I assume those would send children to private schools, avoiding such a system).

> So Boston combats segregation by making children commute for longer ?

Yes, and not just Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing

> Does that also apply to privileged families?

Sometimes. Other times places close the schools in poor/non-white areas.

Lower grade kids in America are too. But once you reach middle school they can be bussed to larger central schools. And demographics shift rapidly here. New developments have lots of new families, but 20 years later there are almost no families. So schools that were built in new neighborhoods become empty. So bussing to even things out.

Our state places elementary schools so young kids don't have to cross a major street, when possible.

idk about Boston, but in Florida, I walked ~1km to elementary school, 15 minute bus to middle school (11-13 yrs old), and then had a 40 km drive/bus to high school.

While if I had stayed and lived in michigan, I would have been 1km walk from elementary, middle, and high school. With a university 5km away.

It all depends on the US city and state and how that community developed/organized.

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