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Comment by etchalon | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of high schoolers who do not live within walking distance of their school, or who aren't safe walking to their school. Buses are unreliable, easy to miss, and public transportation can be expensive.

It's a whole thing.

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As others have said, in Europe (at least in the cities where I grew up) transportation is not an issue.

I went to several schools and kids being driven to school has always been an exception. They mostly walked or took public transport [0]. My sister went to high-school in a more rural area (read far-away suburb) and kids from the surrounding towns used to take the school bus.

Yet, school still started very early, a little past 8:00 AM. I absolutely loathed having to get up so early in the morning (7-ish) and used to be half asleep for the first few periods.

While US issues around transportation certainly don't help, there must be something else going on with the school schedules since they seem to be roughly the same in areas where transportation is not an issue.

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[0] I know there were exceptions for kids living far away, I was one of them since we moved during high-school, but I didn't change schools. However, this is absolutely not the norm where I grew up.

> As others have said, in Europe (at least in the cities where I grew up) transportation is not an issue.

Having spent many hours on the Parisian metro, there’s no chance I’d let my children anywhere near it. Even supervised.

Anywhere you have enough density for a metro local schools are going to be within walking distance.

Ah yes. The Parisian streets. Much safer.

What would be your solution? I hope not the car, that ruins children's self-reliance and is generally to be avoided. Also clutters the streets.

Lived in paris for ~23 years, and took public transports to go to school everyday starting from secondary school (~11 years old). Same was going for my siblings, and a huge part of my classmates, including those that needed to take the RER.

The metro can be unsafe at night, but usually not at times where children commute.

Growing up in the countryside, basically no kid was driven to elementary school, except maybe some first graders early on. You either walk, come by bicycle or take a bus.

I wouldn't call 8:00 "very early". Elementary school started 7:25 for me, "Gymnasium" 7:20. Didn't really have a problem with it, same with my classmates. If you keep a decent sleeping schedule, don't play games on some device right before bed or laze about all day, it's a non-issue under normal circumstances.

> If you keep a decent sleeping schedule

The natural shift of the sleep cycle towards later hours during puberty is exactly the topic.

I would consider myself to be the textbook example: zombiesque in school until 10am, now, 25 years later, I naturally wake up at 6am.

Is that actually a thing though? When I got my own TV, I usually went to bed at ~22:15 because that is when the first evening movie ended. And that was before and after puberty. Eventually, at age 17, I found something I really wanted to watch which aired from 22:00 to 0:00, so that's how long I stayed awake. It had nothing to do with my body. Similarly, talking with classmates, I noticed that girls went to bed earlier (like around 21:00) and that was most likely because there wasn't anything interesting for them to do at later hours, while we boys either watched TV or played games. Almost all the boys quit around 22:00 which would make it a very healthy 8 hour sleep until they got up again. And that is aside from being physically active during the day which makes sleeping in rather simple. Of course, if you sit on your bum all the day, sleeping in does become more difficult as there is little physical exhaustion.

> As others have said, in Europe (at least in the cities where I grew up) transportation is not an issue.

Clearly you didn’t grew in Barcelona, or Paris, or London, …

Back when I had a car commute for work I could tell the day the school summer holidays begin just by how much it took me to get to work.

Isn't it more that parents often take vacations when their children have their, thus less congestion ?

At least in Paris itself, only a third of homes have cars, and in this third, not everyone is going to bring its children to school using it.

Not really, here school ends up at a given date (it’s generally around the 20th of June). It doesn’t matter if it’s Tuesday, and most parents will be still working until August.

In Paris or London, kids are not given a ride to school for a lack of alternatives. No personal experience with Barcelona, but the public transport network looks pretty good, too.

Of course, public transport shouldn't be necessary for most city kids, which ought to have a school in walking and certainly biking[1] distance. It'd be interesting to see the distribution of distance to school in different locations and for different years. Increases in suburbanization are bound to increase the average distance to school; but rural kids even in my generation and more so in my parents and grandparents generation managed much longer commutes without a car as a matter of course.

[1] Maybe kids use the bike less since there's a perception that it's gotten more dangerous. A perception that's not totally wrong, at least in Germany: the number of bike accidents has increased from ~74k in 2000 to 87k in 2019[2], though at least the number of fatal accidents decreased in the same time.

[2] Table 1.1 https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Verkeh...

You’re assuming that all schools are the same, they’re certainly not.

Yes, kids that already live in the city won’t obviously get taken to school by car, but most good schools in the periphery better have a way to handle the cars.

Well, since it's now obvious to you that children living in the city -- a city like London, Paris or Barcelona -- won't get taken to school by car, we seem to be mostly in agreement.

I'm actually in Paris, but grated, I have no idea how things are in Barcelona or London.

I agree that transportation here has many issues and I absolutely hate it, but when I was a kid [0] I could get to school fine with the suburban train. My classmates had no issue getting there with the bus (regular, not school bus).

> Back when I had a car commute for work I could tell the day the school summer holidays begin just by how much it took me to get to work.

Sure, I can tell it from the Paris metro, too. The reason is that people tend to go away on vacation. This also explains the usual spikes in traffic jams the weekend right at the start and at the end of vacations.

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[0] I'm in my thirties, so that wasn't a long time ago

At what age where you riding the train by yourself?

I was around 15, when I started high-school.

Before that, schools tend to be denser. Because I had to attend some special classes, I couldn't go to my local school and needed to go a further one. It was a 30-minute walk.

Normally, kids would go to their local schools, of which I passed one on my way. My local one was in the opposite direction, 2 minutes away from my house.

Did you just claim London has inadequate public transport? When I lived there I had 24 hour busses that could get me from one side of the city to the other, three different train lines, a boat route, and public cycles within walking distance of my flat.

Sure, maybe in smaller cities that’s a problem, but honestly if you’re choosing to drive round London then you’re taking a massively suboptimal method of transport.

Surely it depends on the size of the city/town/village?

I grew up in a small village in rural Scotland, and there was exactly one bus a day to/from School. If I missed it, I had a 5 mile walk to get there. I got a bike at some point, but twisty rural roads were not the safest place to be riding.

This article is from a Swiss University. In the Canton of Zurich, kids are supposed to be walking to school alone by age 6 (law mandates that there must be a school within $WALKING_DISTANCE of any residential building).

High schoolers that need to be taken to school by their parents are definitely the exception.

In the US, maybe. In Europe, it's very unusual for a kid older than ~9 years to be driven to school.

it depends where in Europe. Where I live at least 70% of high-schooler were driven to school.

I have to anecdotally disagree. I am living near to a big high school. Every morning parents, primarily mothers, drive their high school kids into school.

One has to know that every 10 minutes the train stops at the school as it has their own stop.

Busses also stop at school.

Nonetheless the amount of kids in their teens being driven to school by parents is staggering.

I also lived next to a high school. Anecdotally I can say that the amount of kids being driven to school has risen. There is a huge traffic jam now every morning, people in the nearby buildings have adapted to either leave 30min before or after the traffic jam. It definitely wasn't as bad when I was a kid.

Not anymore. I see more and more people driving kids to school.

When I was 9 years old in Europe, I was walking to school almost two kilometers on my own. And since that age I've never been hauled to any school by my parents using any means of transportation.

In Europe, it's very unusual for a kid older than ~9 years to be driven to school.

Here in the UK there are parking restrictions around practically every school to stop parents clogging up the roads to drop off or collect their kids. I'd suggest that's evidence that a lot of children still get taken to school by car.

Sounds like quality of public transport problem. Also, high schoolers are fully competent not to miss busses.

Actually, most of them are not, but that's a learning opportunity! :-)

Here, public transport is super normal way to go to school, work, whatever. High schoolers generally do manage to catch those busses. Middle schooler do manage to catch those busses.

Once in a while someone comes in late. But, it is not that regular thing. Most of them in fact catch busses just fine.

If you can solve a quadratic equation, you can take a bus at 14:34 without any hassle.

Missed connections are usually missed deliberately, regardless of what is said to the parents later.

This is simply untrue. Loads of students in the "high school" age range manage to get to school on time most days. Depending on the country, your 16-18 year old student might not even live at home.

I think discussing this topic without mentioning the country you live in is not meaningful. I assume you are not Swiss (as the article is from a swiss university)?

Because I am and I went to school by bus beginning with 12 years, and busses here are reliable (like "by minute reliable").

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