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Comment by me_smith | Hacker News Reader

My mom walked me to school until I was in 4th grade. She was a single mom and needed to work, so she decided to let me walk to and from school from then on. I made friends on that walk. 30+ years later, I am still friends with many of them even though we live hours away from each other.

I'm not a parent, so I don't know what I don't know; but, I've observed so many kids being shuffled between school, events, "play dates" where it is harder to build deep relationships outside of the parent's sight. Everything is being curated to "ensure" the kids are safe or on the "right" path.

I understand that we live in a different world, but I really do feel that its to the detriment of the kids.

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> I understand that we live in a different world

Do we, though?

Kidnappings have been dropping steadily for decades, though maybe it's because kids are indoors more often now. Though FWIW, most kidnappings are from an insane relative, not the random guy promising candy in his van.

I was allowed to play outside unsupervised when I was only 9 years old in 1991, though maybe being on the Keflavik, Iceland US Navy base played a role in that.

It doesn't, in the early 90s I was even younger in the US and I had to walk to school about a mile along a busy street. There was no other way for me to get there, no bus or anyone around to drive me.

> Do we, though?

Yes we do, and it's covered in the article.

It's not kidnappers. It's distance to school.

80% of kids live too far to walk. It's not that their parents are afraid of kidnappers, it's that they literally cannot feasibly walk to and from school every day.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10917142/

And yet, even for students who live within 0.25 mile of school, a minority walk.

Because road crossing are genuinely terrifying today. The automobiles are too big and the drivers are too distracted. I have a hard time walking my kids across the street for school sometimes and that's with a crossing guard.

People are fucking nuts and are driving around in these oversized vehicles with their phones in their faces. You can very casually, very trivially observe this any time you want by simply walking down a semi-busy street and looking at the drivers as they go by.

Yeah, it's just insane that within .25 mile of a school, there is insufficient sidewalk and signaled crossings to allow walking. It's a complete failure of urban planning.

Honestly, it's frequently hard for me to not attribute it to malice.

Growing up we don’t have sidewalks on most of the roads around school, but they were mostly low volume residential roads.

What we did have was the sixth grade kids acting as the school safety patrol. Those kids would be dismissed 5-10 minutes early, walk in pairs to pick up these bright orange flags, and then fan out around the school to a number of intersections where they were trained in how to be a crossing guard.

It made it safer for even the littlest kids (I walked to school by myself for half day kindergarten in the 80s) both at the crossing and along the roads because you had kids watching kids.

Today my kids’ school has one adult they hire to work about 90 minutes in the morning and afternoon to watch one intersection at the middle school and one at the elementary school. Would be much easier to have kids do it.

There's an entire section and even a chart in the article that explains why this is different now

In 1969 only about 30% of kids lived too far away from school for walking to be a realistic option.

In 2009 (and today) that numbers is around 80%.

Walking to and from school is great if you can do it.

Most people cannot do it.

Seriously - I'd love to have my kids walk but we are 22 miles away (in a rural area).

I grew up in a suburban area so I am out of touch with the rural experience.

Because the article is comparing the past with the present, I am curious what parents were doing in the 90s in your area? And, what are parents doing nowadays?

I'm assuming, either car or bus. And I can't imagine that would have changed since the 90s unless there used to be a school much closer.

When I grew up in a rural area I walked 1/3 mile to meet the school bus. Is that not still the typical experience?

Yea. I get it. Schools are getting farther away. I was lucky to be 2-3 miles away which I think is a reasonable distance. But it really depends on what people are comfortable with which is what this whole article comes down to.

I wonder if this also takes into account families choosing to send their kids to schools farther away. In particular, sending them to private or charter schools that are farther away.

why are schools farther away now? That's interesting.

It's in part because every major US city has spent decades underbuilding housing (usually through zoning and permitting that makes middle-density housing implicitly or explicitly illegal), pushing everyone out into the burbs just to find homes they can afford.

I think we have cause and effect mixed up. The greater of highways post WW2 and the riots of the 60s, and increased affordability of vehicles drove suburbanization.

With less people putting housing pressure in cities, of course you get unbuilding of houses in the cities

It might be due to the school consolidations and schools being moved to cheaper areas.

The article does have a chart that shows distance from their school. I'm curious if there are closer schools that parents chose not to let their child attend. I have known a couple people that drive miles away to drop their kid off to private schools when they have a public school a mile away.

zoning and economies of scale in building out larger schools overall which from a bigger area. throw in pedestrian hostile suburban road design...voila

Nobody wants to pay for teachers. Consequently, they make bigger schools with larger classrooms.

Where I grew up, you had multiple smaller elementary and middle schools eventually feeding into a larger high school.

I disagree it is caused by sub-urbanization or zoning. Housing tracts are built with schools.

I would argue the primary cause is an attempt at "school optimization"; the choice to attend the "better" school over the closer school. Also, standardization of schools has decreased with the great variety of charter, private and magnet schools now, increasing the reasons to skip the local school. Personally, I think standardization is best. You could make the same argument about how people choose colleges.

My high school closed down because there weren’t enough families who could afford to live in the neighborhood.

At least where I live, most families are moving to new development areas to get more square footage per dollar. So the schools in the established part of town are seeing declining attendance and having to consolidate to prevent high administrative overhead. The new development areas are car-only hellscapes (neighborhoods on random parcels of land that have been bought up and developed with no forward thinking) with pickup lines as described in the article.

It's also fashionable for parents to choose a school across town for arbitrary reasons in order to signal that they care more about their children (in my opinion). We have tried advocating for the local options and the positives it has had for getting to know others in the community but most don't even consider.

I'm lucky to live in an older neighborhood with an elementary school, middle school, grocery store, and a few other shops. There are also safe ways for kids to cross from adjacent neighborhoods so there is still a lot of autonomy for the kids getting to and from school.

>Walking to and from school is great if you can do it.

This. I would have let my kids walk to school, but one of the intersections would have been totally unsafe.

Walking from primary school was the shit. Playing with the electric fence, cycling on the frozen stream, getting scalded for being late...

You also can't really choose to opt out without leaving the country because lots of places make it illegal for your under <13 kid to go anywhere on their own.

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