It's quite normal in Europe and Scandinavia
Probably more than 2/3 travel to the local school by bicycle, on foot, or by bus where I live in Norway. By bus because we are a rural kommune and some children live too far away to walk or cycle.
Probably more than 2/3 travel to the local school by bicycle, on foot, or by bus where I live in Norway. By bus because we are a rural kommune and some children live too far away to walk or cycle.
I live in central Stockholm and indeed walk to school with my youngest kid.
But every single day I’m amazed and frankly enraged by the massive number of cars leaving kids right outside the school gates.
And often driving off at high speed, checking phones for that “important” morning meeting.
Frankly sick of reading this mythical ‘car-free’ Europe thing. Neighbors as close geographically as Sweden and Denmark can be light years apart in their cultural values.
Saying it's normal doesn't rule out exceptions, even frequent ones.
Riding my bike the few miles ended up being shorter time door to desk.
Daily doses of outside and brief forced exercise were fringe benefits
I kind of wonder whether the fatalities would be worth the tradeoff if America encouraged biking to improve health at the cost of road carnage, but my inclination is to say yes even in the case of children.
From what I have seen of the Netherlands, the bike paths are physically separated from the driving lanes (except side residential streets) so there is much less risk of a cyclist getting run over, side swiped, or cut off by a vehicle.
Funding these would be easy, just drop the speed limit by 5mph and then automate the issuing of tickets to drivers exceeding the speed limit. Tell voters what the enforcement action is funding and that once the bike paths are finished the speed enforcement will ease off a bit (but not completely.)
another very important factor in road safety in the netherlands is that bicycle users and car users are only mixed in low speed situation (less then 30km/h if i remember correctly) and that car drivers are always at fault for an accident with a bike with the exception of some very specific, hard to prove cases.
Drivers education stresses this dearly, and because everyone in the netherlands grows up riding a bike, the social contract to keep bikers safe is very highly lived after.
Europeans underestimate how different countries in Europe are.
I want some of those here.
Academic outcomes show this doesn’t help the students, but cities continue on regardless. What person thinks a 40 minute commute for a child is appropriate or healthy? I would be shocked if that worked for anyone.
Additionally, people literally buy houses for the school district - if you start to disrupt that system you'll potentially cause a shift in housing values and then you're up against both the rich and property owners and America can't win that fight with its current political system - money carries too loud of a vote.
Within a school district, teachers are assigned. They rarely get the school they want. So for any given school, an entire district has the same pool of teachers. And yet some schools are much worse than others.
Busing hasn't been a thing for many years, and never was in use in "most cities".
Edit: for those in other countries, "busing" in this context means loading the children who would normally attend one school onto a bus and transporting them to another (often distant) school. The intent behind this was to even out the distribution of races among the schools. It never did work well (not the least because essentially all of the students and parents involved hated it), and was effectively banned by a series of Supreme Court decisions starting in the 1990s.