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Comment by agentdrtran | Hacker News Reader

> High school students are perfectly capable of waking up and getting ready for the day after their parents have left the house.

Unless, of course, they need a ride to school.

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What is it with parents driving their kids to school these days? Or is it a US thing? Back when I was in school, every single kid would ride the school bus. Well, except those close enough to walk/cycle, or those old enough to own and drive a car or scooter.

Exactly. I was walking over 3 kilometers (2 miles) to school since I was 7 years old (I started school at 6, so I my parents drove me for a year to adjust). Nowadays parents treat their kids like they were made of candy glass.

Geez, if I put all my high school books in my bag it weighed 40 pounds (I measured it once). And the cold weather means walking wasn't always an option.

I lived 2km from my primary school, and 4km from my middle and high school. My school bag was 16kg.

And it was easily possible to walk there, or later, bike there. (although I had to walk every now and so often when my bike broke down in -14°C in winter).

I don’t really see where the issue is?

Different cultures I guess. I definitely would not have done that as a kid, my parents wouldn't have allowed me to, and someone would have called the police if they saw a 10y/o walking along these roads

Probably. Here everyone did it, alone at my school we had 700 kids each morning coming by bike or foot. Out of 1200.

It was literally impossible to drive on the road for cars during the half hour each morning and afternoon where we kids were there.

Similar to Amsterdam or København

It must be culture, at least in areas where walking to school is pretty convenient. Anecdote: When I was growing up, I walked to elementary school, all of five or six neighborhood blocks. The one kid who got driven to school, got teased for it.

Today, same school, same neighborhood, is a traffic jam every morning, as the kids are all driven to school. I could very well imagine parents saying that it's no longer safe to walk, due to the traffic. :-(

Aren't you worried about stress fractures in your feet? Especially since your bones were still growing at the time?

2km. 1.24 miles? Stress fractures? What?

Every student on a residential college campus that's bigger than tiny is going to walk 3 or 4 times that in a day. Middle school students will stress their bodies a few orders of magnitude harder in sports practices (or even light exercise).

Why would I? Humans are built for walking, this is literally what we evolved to do.

4km a day, or later 8km a day is nothing, and has never caused me or anyone else I know – and literally every child here does this – any issues.

Even today, when I’m bored and I know the bus will only come in 30min, I usually just walk 6km home from uni.

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I’m not even sure if your comment isn’t just satire, exaggerating the helicopter-mentality of some northamerican parents.

I've always had problems with my feet and legs, so I'm probably just paranoid about it. No way I could walk that much on a regular basis without surgery.

If you can't walk the equivalent of five lengths around a standard track without stress fractures you have a serious, debilitating disease and should see a doctor immediately.

Isn't a standard track only ~a quarter mile (400m)? With a 40 lb pack, twice a day, plus hills, on young bones, with poor judgment about balance and weight placement, someone's going to get hurt. Stress fractures didn't seem implausible, though I suppose ligament injuries are more likely?

And yes, every specialist I've been to has said all I can do is try to protect my joints until I eventually decide I want surgery.

Luxury!

I went to high school in Wisconsin and walking was always an option. We did close schools when the temperature dropped below -40, though.

uphill both ways and everything?

I live in Wisconsin and ride my bike to work throughout the year. Amusingly, it's often up-wind both ways, because the wind changes direction during the day. My kids walk or bike to school, or take the city bus.

No, it was pretty flat. I'm amused that this sounds improbable, though. Cold isn't that big of an obstacle. I hated Wisconsin winters, but it's just a matter of dressing properly.

>And the cold weather means walking wasn't always an option.

Walking works great even when the roads are unusable for cars. The only relevant limit to walking in the winter is your clothing.

And every kid just gets frostbite as a learning experience? Been there done that, got the scar for it. Not something I would want for my kids, thanks.

The opportunity to learn here is prioritization and utilization. Will you need all books at home today, can I do this homework at school during lunch, study hall, or before after?

I wouldn't need all books all days, but some days I did. I didn't usually have a study hall. I'm not sure what learning has to do with it? I don't control how much homework gets assigned or when.

I'm a Junior in highschool and I have the same problems. Some teachers require you to bring all your books to their class every day. Others usually use textbook information to create PowerPoints which they use in class but it is still useful to have the textbook open to learn all the information which they skip. Students usually avoid carrying around textbooks by leaving most of their books in their lockers at school for most of the year but this makes it hard to study outside of school. They also cram all their homework during studyhalls and copy homework from others instead of actually studying though.

Where I grew up, you had to live more than 2.2 miles to qualify for the bus. I lived 2.1. Not an ideal distance to walk, especially since most of it was major roads without sidewalks

I lived 1.5; I bicycled most days. My story for my kids will involve uphill both ways, off roading when there was traffic, through a graveyard, and a few days with limited amounts of ice/snow.

My parents definitely didn't do that in the 80s/90s in the US. It might be a regional thing, though. It was basically the same where I grew up: the bus was how one got to school. If you didn't like it, ride your bike.

It was also easily the worst part of the day, so I can't blame parents from wanting to get their kids out of that.

Take a bus? What teenager can't take a bus by themselves?

In my district (and all the districts around me) there is no busing for high-school students. So for the students that don't drive (Which would account for probably more then half the school), parents or someone else has to drive them.

And no public bus either I assume? I always took public transport to school, but I know that's highly dependant on where you live.

Public busing in the US is awful in most cities. In the suburbs it's basically just to downtown and from downtown.

I didn't say busing for students, I meant take a bus with everyone else.

There's only one district I know of, of the ones which don't offer busing for high-school students, which has a public bus that goes to the high-school. My district in particular doesn't have any public buses that go to the high-school.

I took a tram to college. It went to downtown, not the campus, so I walked the rest of the way.

It's not ideal, but I didn't have my parents drive me (I didn't have a car). I don't see why high school students can't do this.

What exactly are you proposing high-school students in my district do?

Perhaps I should have clarified, there are no buses/trams/subways or any type of public transportation in my school district for high-school students to take, because there is no public transportation period in my city. The only options for going to school are walk, ride a bike, or drive, and the first two aren't practical during winter - that's besides the fact that I lived three miles away from the school.

Those who live in developments explicitly planned to leverage the fact that people have cars to spread them out further and give each family more land/house for the same money.

In these places, everyone who matters politically has a car, everywhere they want to go has parking, roads are huge, etc. so there is no political will for expensive transit, and the surface area is too large to cover effectively with cheap transit.

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