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Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

In many countries kids walk to school.

And walk home for lunch.

Sure, I'm Spanish, I did that.

The walk to anywhere my education happened until I was 18 was took 10 minutes. after that, when I went to college, I had a bus stop about 200 meters from my house that got me there in another 30-40 minutes depending on traffic and such. I didn't finish college and pursued a different kind of higher education degree, that was about a 15 min ride via subway, the stop being less than 3 min away from my home. Then a different one of the same kind, which was a 15 min walk from my home.

My impression is that numbers like this are not at all the usual in the US, I will concede that the area in which I live is pretty well connected, but to be clear, these aren't crazy numbers by any measure.

Another datapoint: North Sweden middle of nowhere:

Class 1 - 9 Walk/bike to school 5 minutes.

Class 10 - 12 Regular buss ride 45 minutes one way.

University either continue same buss ride or move to student appartment and do 5 minutes walks again.

Where I live we don't even have sidewalks in large amounts of the city, let alone crossings, and heavy snow for three~ months of the year.

With high enough population density and near-by schools these ideas could work, but the US is very spotty and way way too car-centric for this to be a turn-key solution.

My wife grew up in Canada. She walked in the snow. 1.5 km. My kids charter school has no bus. There best friends are home schooled. And we are thinking of switching to that.

Obviously not viable everywhere. But there are alternatives

Your alternative relies on a parent being able to not work, that isn't an alternative for many households (least of all single-parent ones).

Agreed. US cities generally have way less population densities than European cities. Basically, the New York City metro and perhaps Chicago (mostly within the El, but perhaps more broadly if we include the commuter rail lines) are the main cities I can think of where public transit makes good economic sense. Most other cities are heavily subsidized and still underused. Hence school buses rather thank kids taking transit to school.

In most places in the U.S., city planners have engineered that to be impossible.

According to Google Maps my high school was 13.9 miles from my house

My daughter will start kindergarten next fall here in the US; she’ll walk to school through elementary school (500 meters) and middle school (800 meters). Not walking to school is not an “American” thing, it’s a “suburb” thing.

Or they use public transport: Kid me in Germany had a daily 30 minute public bus commute from primary school to day care, and about a similar commute back from there to home.

Secondary school was a 30 minute subway commute to it, and back from it, 5 times a week.

Not much has changed about that in the decades since; To this day one of the most crowded times in German public transport is right after school ends at 1 PM.

That's not going to fly in a sprawling suburban school district in Minnesota.

Parents will need to drive their own kids to school then. No different than consumers who can’t or won’t pay exorbitant fees to have groceries or takeout delivered.

> Parents will need to drive their own kids to school then.

So is the school day going to get longer or the work day shorter? Or do all households now all need two parents with only one working?

If there’s no funding to raise pay for bus drivers causing a shortage, it’s possible all of the above to assemble some semblance of a school day. Maybe some kids drop out of school entirely if there’s no transportation and parents can’t provide it. Inelastic demand that exceeds supply results in shortages.

“This fall, the shortage became dire enough that Steele’s old route — the one where she knew all the kids well enough to take them to their doorsteps when needed — was consolidated out of existence. In October, the district told parents that 12 routes probably wouldn’t be staffed this year. Steele was transferred to a different route with new kids, and sometimes the chaos of route changes and late buses meant she also had to drive kids home from other, equally unfamiliar routes.”

According to federal safety standards, the children will be safer in the car with seatbelts, rather than the school bus without seatbelts.

Who would want to transport children on busses when the safety devices are purposefully missing?

I experienced this as a foreign exchange student… and it permanently ruined me. There’s just no way for me to recreate this experience for my kids, but I am glad that our school district is working hard to put locally grown produce on lunch trays, even if I’d rather have the kids walk home for lunch. It just isn’t a practical model for most American families where parents work outside the home and often with long commutes. Am glad more people are working from home - maybe this model will someday be practical.

Indeed: https://savvytokyo.com/preparing-your-child-to-walk-to-schoo...

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