Hacker News Reader

Comment by MerelyMortal | Hacker News Reader

A scattering of small 8-kid daycares (like how the one in the article already is), is good for mixed residential use.

An 8-kid daycare expanding to a 16-kid daycare is what the neighborhood fought against, and sounds like a reasonable to fight to me.

View on HN

Why does that sound like a reasonable thing to you?

To me, a 16 kid daycare also seems tiny.

Its not about the 16 kids, its about the traffic from drops off and picks ups clogging up the streets during busy times. Unloading and loading a kid takes time.

Worst case, that's just 16 cars, twice a day. That doesn't seem like a thing to make a big stink about.

There are plenty of annoyances that come with living near other people. Putting up with a reasonable level of annoyance is an important part of having a civil society. I put up with my neighbor's bullshit and they put up with mine.

I agree, it's the perception of there will be a problem the neighbors were sold on. But none of us live on that street, so they can do as they wish.

Oh, certainly they can. It's just that the whole thing sounds very petty to me. I suspect that I'd hate living in that neighborhood.

It really doesn't take that much time. On most roads you'd be hard pressed to notice 16 cars. What kind of road are they on where this would be material?

And one reason people choose daycares is because they are close. Where I live anyway many of us walk our kids to daycare.

My guess is they either don't like the woman or the idea of daycare. The car excuse is extremely flimsy.

There's between 500 and a thousand homes within a short ten minute, quarter mile walk of this daycare. There should be no traffic impacts whatsoever from this business, because nobody should be driving to drop off their kid at daycare. If their neighborhood is suffering from car traffic, then that's due to poor street design not supporting alternatives, not any single business attracting customers.

Nobody likes cars driving through their neighborhood. If these were good faith concerns, then these folks would be agitating for traffic calming measures instead of trying to quash the exact kind of business that belongs in a "residential area."

So once again cars are the problem. Get rid of cars and suddenly so many things are possible.

I strongly suspect that cars are the excuse, not the actual problem.

As a German, this deeply inculcated car-centric view presented by Americans, Canadians and Australians shocks me every time.

As an American, it frequently shocks me as well.

Even 16 kids doesn't sound like much of a nuisance. I guess the main objection would be to the cars dropping them off/picking them up, but that's only twice a day, and presumably some of the kids share the same parents.

It's contained in a single home which, presumably, the owners still live in. In terms of traffic, you're looking at an extra ~32 cars/day which is likely a rounding error in terms of total traffic.

I have no idea what the current parking situation looks like but daycares definitely aren't known for drawing continuous traffic.

I’m familiar with the pricing and the books behind such 8 kid daycares and it’s not so great.

Considering how few kids Vancouver already has, a 16 kid daycare just brings things up to around a normal density of children.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com