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.

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.