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Comment by debesyla | Hacker News Reader

Crazy idea, but why do kids need dropping them off to school?

If school is not further than 1 km, kid can just walk there. And in most German (and other European) cities schools are nearby.

And for locations that are remote, there are school buses, and public buses too...

Kid transportation is important, but it doesn't have to be cars. (I won't even go into kids who bycicle to their schools.) Of course, I understand that for kindergarten it's a different topic, but if we are taking about schools a person is already of age where they know where their home is and where they are going to.

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You’re going to let your first grader (6yo) use public transit in America solo? In Copenhagen maybe but sounds like lunacy here.

> You’re going to let your first grader (6yo) use public transit in America solo? In Copenhagen maybe but sounds like lunacy here.

I mean, that's the exact point being made. The problem isn't public transport, it's American public transport. The USA could just copy what works from the rest of the world, if only it didn't already suffer the misapprehension of being the best at absolutely everything and having nothing to learn.

The rest of the world doesn't understand the US's problems. There are portions of the problem that are as easy as cutting and pasting transit systems from elsewhere, but unfortunately those are the easy parts.

Poverty, crime, sprawl, and untreated mental illness all really complicate the public transit situation for the US, and they feed upon themselves and create a terrible negative feedback loop for transit.

> Poverty, crime, sprawl, and untreated mental illness all really complicate the public transit situation for the US, and they feed upon themselves and create a terrible negative feedback loop for transit.

These are also places where the USA could do better if it didn't think it was already the best.

Like, for crime, the USA treats gun control as outside the Overton Window saying e.g. "we need guns for self defence", while the UK is apparently a crime-free haven in comparison because the British *Police* are not armed by default and overwhelmingly don't want to be.

Sprawl is harder to fix once the cities are built. But even dense cores I've seen in the USA don't have great public transit networks.

I have absolutely no idea why, or even if, America has more untreated mental health issues than Europe in general. But your governments at each level ought to.

> Like, for crime, the USA treats gun control as outside the Overton Window saying e.g. "we need guns for self defence"

Without a hint of the self-awareness that the most likely person to be shot by your gun is yourself, either in the obvious case of suicide or where the gun has been taken from you either by family or theft.

They're all interrelated problems with multidecade response times to policy and dispute about the best path to fixing them. And the solutions to each aren't the same as in Europe, and the US has a hard time with consistent policy when there's no immediate payoff.

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