The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

Well that headline sums it up. After 10 years of dealing with it and wondering &quot;how the f did we get to this point&quot;, it&#x27;s satisfying to hear it called what it is.<p>A small win in our family was in my son&#x27;s final year of elementary school when he finally decided to try walking home 1.5 miles; that Spring was a delight for him. He was properly decompressed and had logged a minimum amount of physical activity for good sleep and all the rest.<p>Pay for the buses! Build the greenways! Normalize walking! And stop worrying about abductions for the love of gawd!

I think this article misses the one big problem (as I understand it). It&#x27;s that schools need to dismiss the kid to their parent. I have family in North Carolina and I understand that cars have the family number displayed, and someone with a radio communicates to the school staff &quot;Car 315 is here&quot;, they then find that kid and dismiss them. Just do away with that. When the bell rings, send the kids outside and they will just find their parent. That&#x27;s how my kids school works and there is no traffic jam.

An odd choice of dates in the charts: 1969, 2009, 2017, 2022. 40 years between the first two and less than ten between the other ones. I would have liked to see more uniform spacing between the first two to understand whether the change across those 40 years was gradual.<p>Our family suffers this insanity, too. This is one of the few things my spouse absolutely <i>refuses</i> to budge on: she won&#x27;t let our child walk, bicycle, or even take the school bus to school because of vague &quot;danger&quot; that the news media is pumping into her. School is only 3 miles away and we live in a peaceful rural-to-suburban area. The kid could walk that distance at midnight and not be even remotely at risk. No facts, statistics or reasoning works.

My mom walked me to school until I was in 4th grade. She was a single mom and needed to work, so she decided to let me walk to and from school from then on. I made friends on that walk. 30+ years later, I am still friends with many of them even though we live hours away from each other.<p>I&#x27;m not a parent, so I don&#x27;t know what I don&#x27;t know; but, I&#x27;ve observed so many kids being shuffled between school, events, &quot;play dates&quot; where it is harder to build deep relationships outside of the parent&#x27;s sight. Everything is being curated to &quot;ensure&quot; the kids are safe or on the &quot;right&quot; path.<p>I understand that we live in a different world, but I really do feel that its to the detriment of the kids.

Counter point: I used to walk home from school. Got robbed at gun point several times. Jumped for my skin color numerous times. Had a neighborhood buddy who got stabbed three times on his way home and survived. I can go on and on and on. I had to learn to walk an extra 20-30 minutes to avoid these situations. I will never let my kids walk home in 2025.<p>Edit: no one told these parents to drive up for pick up like a drive-through. In most cases, it is a choice. You can opt to park like a normal person and walk up. This article is absurd. Most of these parents are too lazy to walk 5 minutes. I’ve seen parents show up 40 minutes to be first in queue…just so they don’t have to get out of their cars. Makes zero sense.

100% agree with the title.<p>I live ~1 mile from the local school complex (primary, middle, high all share a gigantic piece of land, though are separate full-size schools). You literally don&#x27;t have to cross a street to get there from my house - it&#x27;s all neighborhood walking paths and there&#x27;s a short underpass at the one road. Yet, kids are not supposed to walk. There&#x27;s a bus, which isn&#x27;t the end of the world. Except in the time it takes to wait for the bus, you could walk most of the way to school. And 1&#x2F;4 of the parents drive their kids anyway.<p>It&#x27;s completely absurd.<p>Of course, I walk the ~1 mile to my office in the other direction and most of my coworkers think I&#x27;m a loon. So, I guess this shouldn&#x27;t be surprising. Americans are just hard-wired to drive even the shortest distances. We&#x27;ve done such a piss-poor job with urban planning and transit design that 3+ generations of Americans think anything but a car is unthinkable (literally, I don&#x27;t think it crosses their minds).

We live across the street from our kids elementary and middle schools. There is a sidewalk and a crosswalk to the school. Parents in our subdivision still choose to drive in because &quot;the crosswalk is too dangerous&quot;. Schools can&#x27;t afford crossing guards, county engineers claim it is an enforcement issue, police can&#x27;t cover it with their limited staffing, and Republicans are banning school speeding cameras in Georgia.

I looked at the author’s Google map view of the 2 miles they couldn’t walk to school, and the enormous grassed area next to the road would have meant I’d be walking that quite happily in the UK.

Unfortunately we are one of those families.<p>The bus service is completely unreasonable. They shopped it out to the lowest bidder and the stops are all in terrible spots on busy streets. It also takes longer to sit and wait in the cold with a 6 year old than it would be to just drive there and back.

I just want to highlight this link in the article, about a mother who was arrested because her son walked less than a mile into town (population 370) on his own [0]. Arrested. For putting him in danger.<p>What a mess.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reason.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;11&#x2F;11&#x2F;mom-jailed-for-letting-10-year-old-walk-alone-to-town&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reason.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;11&#x2F;11&#x2F;mom-jailed-for-letting-10-year...</a>

Sometimes I truly wonder how the US is so far ahead in innovation and efficiency. This is unthinkable, how many hours of driving to and fro + this queue each day.<p>Here I am, in Germany, my kid goes to school by himself since second grade. Most of his classmates started to walk, bike, or take the train, bus or tram themselves at 3rd or 4th grade. Beyond 6th grade, it&#x27;s considered a spoiled baby.

Great article. It wouldn&#x27;t be that difficult for schools and cities to encourage walking or biking. There are lots of easy things that could be done. My daughter&#x27;s school doesn&#x27;t properly clear the sidewalks during winter. The giant parking lot is always immaculate though. They actually renovated and rerouted traffic to make it less safe for pedestrians. My daughter&#x27;s friend was hit in a crosswalk (with a crossing guard!) by a parent leaving school after dropping her kid off. No penalty to the driver.

This problem is over for me, as my son has graduated, but part of the problem is NIMBY&#x27;ified suburban roads that dead-end rather than connecting neighborhoods (in order to cut down on neighborhood traffic).<p>My son&#x27;s school was about 250 meters from his mom&#x27;s house. Due to the NIMBY way the neighborhoods were built, he would have had to ride his bike or walk 2.5 miles on busy roads w&#x2F;o bike lanes to get to his mom&#x27;s house. The direct route was 2 dead end roads that should have connected the neighborhoods together. But instead, there was ~30m of dense forest marked with &quot;no trespassing&quot; signs.<p>This meant that me and his mom had to wait in the school line rather than him being able to walk&#x2F;bike to and from school. Even when I had custody, I would have much rather picked him up from his mom&#x27;s house than school because the line was miserable.<p>I was so happy when he got his license and was able to drive himself.

I used to walk or take the bus, even in elementary school. I am not sure at what point parents decided they must take their kids to school. We did have parents dropping kids off and it was busy but not like it is now. I know then, at least to me, there was a sort of an air about about seeing kids being picked up or dropped off because they didn&#x27;t have to ride the bus. Maybe that&#x27;s it, parents gave in to not wanting their kids to feel less about themselves because they had to ride the bus?

Thinking through where I&#x27;ve lived -- a lot of the original school buildings built in circa 1950 were more in city center. The article touches on the move of schools to the outskirts of town as a cost savings measure but I think the opposite may be true.<p>As population and (perceived) facilities increased, the schools built new buildings in farmland or other wide open areas on the outskirts of town to have more room for stuff like stadiums, huge auditoriums, bigger playgrounds. The land may be cheaper but the new high schools are almost more like college campuses vs. stately buildings in the middle of town.<p>There&#x27;s an appetite for more and we&#x27;ve relocated schools to make more room not save money.

&gt; Likewise, a mom was recently arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk into town.<p>That linked article is incredible to me (considering how much I used to walk around at that age).<p>If our culture becomes so backwards that you will actually be criminalized for letting your kids move around independently, then of course we&#x27;ll be doomed to car pickup lines forever.

Like many societal issues, support for bike transport would be one way to address this.<p>To help support that, it should be expected that on the first day of school, police officers will ride bikes along all the routes students are expected to cover --- to help support that, bring back truant officers and put them on bicycles.

This is why I was adamant that my kids took the school bus when it is an option.<p>Even though my family has the flexible schedule to handle dropping kids via car, by using the bus system I help support the community and others who might not have that flexibility.<p>Plus, the school bus is one of the first places a kid might be without (much) adult supervision. A tremendous growth opportunity, where you learn how to deal with discomfort, difference and drama.

Surely behavior of children on a busses plays _some_ role in this decision. Not sure how they would even gather stats on this but busses in my youth were total zoos.<p>Further, schools near me won&#x27;t allow many children to walk home even within a safe walking distance with parental consent for (and I quote) &quot;liability reasons&quot;. Absurd.

This is the kind of article that needs to get into national culture. We gotta change the way we live. I don&#x27;t know how to get it to happen, but we need more people doing this.

Moved to Germany. Put kids 4 6 in school. School sends letter home: parents, please stop driving kids to school. Walking is part of the experience.<p>It’s the same all over Europe.<p>The distance to school is a social choice. But in the US, kids can’t even get off a school bus without a parent waiting<p>Fear culture and security theater

I frequently contemplate the cumulative pollution of all these cars idling in every town across the country 5 days a week twice a day.

It’s awful. Big long line where I live and it used to be handled by one school bus and kids walking home. Imagine the waste of human productive time, fuel, etc. I’m always astounded this many people don’t have a job to be at at 3pm.

I think parental paranoia plays a very small role in this. If at least one thing were to change: reasonable schoolbus routes, walkability, traffic safety, public transport, then we&#x27;d see a huge uptick.

Not much to do for most of the parents, TBH, especially if you want to get into a good school.<p>Me? I picked the public elementary school 10 minutes of walk away instead of the private one that is 20+ minutes of driving. I don&#x27;t want everyone in the household gets frustrated pretty much every Mon-Fri.<p>Secondary school is going to be a bit of issue. We do have one that is adjacent to the said elementary school but it is not very good. But then my son would be 11 years old by then so hopefully he can just take the bus.

I didn’t understand at the time how much of a privilege it was that I could walk to school where I grew up (with crossing guards for the elementary schoolers, even!) and more importantly that my parents encouraged it, even if it was a bit of a hike to middle and high school without a bike.<p>Unfortunately we moved during high school and lived something like 15 miles from the new school; at least there was a bus.

As the author mentioned the rise of ebikes is counteracting this, however the ones popular with teens (Surrons and other similar chinese brands) require you to cut one wire to remove the speed limiter and then they can do 50MPH.<p>The idea of common spaces in American cities largely died during &amp; after Covid. Anything you did in public (gyms, eating out, public transport, apartment common areas) was suddenly prey to whatever idea a politician had that morning. I think we all remember walking into a restaurant with a mask on, to promptly take it off as soon as you sat down. At the same time as these guidelines were being piled on, basically all laws below murder stopped being enforced. So you had to negotiate a bus full of drug addicts shooting up and riding for free, or leave the sidewalk because it had been taken over by a tent city.<p>Personal transport is required in America, the places with the infrastructure to avoid it dont have the capacity to govern (any big city). The places with the governing capacity (suburban, rural areas) dont have the infrastructure.

What about the people that report parents to the police for endangering their children by allowing them to walk&#x2F;bike to school?

The weirdest part of my school day was wandering out of the recess lot and trying to find Mom’s car every day. A lot of my classmates were bused in from 15 miles away and we were second-class “townies” but yet, we lived outside the parochial territory. Fifth Estate, I suppose.<p>Once Dad bought a new car and surprised us by not picking us up in the one we recognized?!<p>Around 5th grade I had some sort of trauma-drama on the soccer field, needed to call in Mom for a pickup. I didn’t know what a busy-tone sounded like despite figuring out the payphone on campus. I held the receiver to my ear for 10 minutes anxiously hoping Mom would answer.<p>I believe the rare school bus rides were field trips, and once my friend and I were in the rear, frantically waving and smiling at every other motorist to see how they’d respond, and we failed to cause any accidents<p>I feel it was a curse on Mom to put so many miles on Soccer Mom Car. Parents couldn’t hardly wait for our maturity and licensing!

Raising children is no longer a communal effort.<p>If you let your kid out roaming, walking home from school, and the child causes a minor issue, you get the wrath of &quot;Why aren&#x27;t you watching your kid?&quot;???<p>So we&#x27;ve developed this culture around ensuring that the child is accounted for at all hours of the day. Drop off, pickup from school, included.

This is a good piece that is undermined somewhat by the AI imagery. My goal isn&#x27;t to just complain about AI, but I&#x27;ve been reflecting on how my own mental process unfolded while reading this.<p>&gt; Note: I used AI to create this image rather than pull one from another site without permission.<p>I don&#x27;t have kids, and while I&#x27;ve seen pickup lines from time to time, I have very little first-hand experience with them. So my brain reacts to the image:<p>- Is this image a realistic representation?<p>- If it is, I have no first-hand knowledge to verify it<p>- If it&#x27;s not, I have no way to know without going and looking for images myself<p>- If it is, it&#x27;s undermining the content by representing something real with something fake<p>Artwork&#x2F;illustrations&#x2F;visualizations are often critical when communicating via text. But I think that when someone is writing about a factual matter - a real phenomenon that is occurring regularly - using fake imagery is just the wrong choice.

The bar chart is pretty funny. &quot;Over 3 miles&quot; is the highest bucket? That&#x27;s supposed to be far?<p>I went to school in a semi-rural school district, one of the largest in the state by area. I just checked Google Maps and the high school is 13 miles away, 16 minutes by car (much of it highway), and maybe a half hour by school bus if I remember correctly. It could be a bit tedious, but it wasn&#x27;t a terrible commute by any means.<p>&gt; Parents are not simply choosing to drive their children to school because it’s fun to sit in a long line. It is becoming more of a necessity because schools are more spread out than before, or at least families are living further from their schools.<p>Necessity? I don&#x27;t see what&#x27;s wrong with school buses. They&#x27;re just about the only practical form of mass transit in rural areas. They work for all ages, in any weather where the school is open at all.

Does this article really need a visual aid of cars waiting in a line, let alone a sloppy AI generated visual aid?

At the core this behavior is simply a version of social proof. Parents see what other parents do and&#x2F;or kids see friends being picked up and then put pressure on their parents to do the same. Then it gets to a tipping point where it just becomes the thing that you do (and nobody thinks otherwise or wants to tell their kids they won&#x27;t do this or questions it).<p>It&#x27;s also a way for a parent to think somehow they are doing the right thing and get a little enjoyment in their head (despite the time involved or wasted) &#x27;I am a good parent&#x27;. Doesn&#x27;t involve as much effort as other things a parent does (or should do) it&#x27;s simple (other than the time).

I wonder if taking your kids in your country to school by car instead of going on foot might have anything to do with child kidnapping &amp; killings? where the police was too lame to actual find the kids and more died. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;White_March" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;White_March</a>

My kids&#x27; school used to let parents into the yard during dropoff and pickup. It was wonderful: a time for the kids to play with their friends and the parents to mingle and catch up. Now we have the car dropoff&#x2F;pickup line. I&#x27;m for &quot;everyone park and walk your kid into school&quot; or &quot;let kids go home by themselves if it&#x27;s safe to do so&quot; [0]. The car pickup and dropoff is the absolute worst.<p>[0] Our current bike route from home to school isn&#x27;t optimal -- too many busy streets where drivers routinely run reds. That&#x27;s a rant for another day...

&gt; The classic yellow school bus is a national icon.<p>It is, but like the pickup line, it’s also a national embarrassment. Half the buses in my town are ancient and belch black smoke like a semi rolling coal.

The article makes a lot of great points, but looks to miss that kids are enrolled in a lot of after school activities these days.<p>I was never enrolled in any as a kid and never really expected for my kid to be, because I thought parents were the motivating factor for kids to get into a bunch of activities, but IME they aren&#x27;t. My kid loves her activities and picking her up to shuttle her directly to it is a lot quicker than using a bus or walking.

Car line is a choice. I park a block away and walk to the school to do the pick up. Waiting in line to avoid walking is stupid and lazy.

I guess this is what they call American Exceptionalism?

We park on the other side of a city park from my daughter&#x27;s school. ...The five minute walk thru the park together is a highlight of my day.

Californians should read this too:<p>(TLDR: It&#x27;s Prop 13&#x27;s fault)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kqed.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;11980715&#x2F;why-dont-more-bay-area-kids-ride-school-buses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kqed.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;11980715&#x2F;why-dont-more-bay-area-ki...</a><p>&gt;California has fewer school buses than in other parts of the country. A survey conducted by the Federal Highway Administration found that nationally, almost 40% of school-aged kids ride a school bus. In California, that number is only 8%.<p>&gt;Like so many questions related to school funding and services, the answer to Winters’ question has roots in the passage of Proposition 13

I was driven to school during preschool, kindergarten, and part of grade school, biked or walked in junior high or high school. My kid is in preschool and I drive him or walk him to school. He&#x27;ll be able to walk to junior high and high school, and will probably take the bus to grade school. I don&#x27;t mind the pickup line right now.

The real tragedy is that people don’t let their kids walk or bike to school anymore unsupervised.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;article-462091&#x2F;How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;article-462091&#x2F;How-children...</a><p>How children lost the right to roam in four generations

Our infrastructure in general is a national embarrassment. I&#x27;m more pessimistic on this category than anything else. The best possible future I can imagine in the USA, transportation-wise, is not having to hold the steering wheel during a robo traffic jam.

At many schools, the school bus was an embarrassment too, or at least some routes as neighborhood demographics changed<p>The most rambunctious, violent, harrowing and underpoliced part of the day<p>Not offering a solution, just an observation

Helicopter parents exist because public trust is completely eroded.<p>I don&#x27;t want to blame it on diversity but the example provided in the article is a homogenous-culture society with high trust.

I came in expecting this was going to be a methodological article. Maybe better let the kids wait as opposed to the parents in their cars?

The pickup point should be 1km from the school unless you have a doctors note. Kids need to walk that much or more anyway for health.

Are any kids commuting to school by electric bike&#x2F;scooter? Maybe secure storage during the school day is an issue?

I live in a relatively residential neighborhood in NYC next to a school (outside of the congestion zone). The morning dropoffs and afternoon pickups are insane. It literally causes a gridlock for a couple hours in a part of the neighborhood that has like 4 intersections. Somehow we have to get back to the days when parents trusted the community that their kid is going to get home safe, otherwise this nonsense is never going to end.

&gt; the leading cause of death for American youngsters is from car-related incidents.<p>I&#x27;ve read some timed ago that drowning in swimmingpools was the leading cause of deaths for kids. So maybe the mandatory protections (fences) there did help. So more schoolbuses could help with their pickup line crisis.<p>In Germany in our schools such pickup lines are explicitly forbidden. Kids must go by themselves (bus or bike). Helicopter parenting is frawned upon, and recent right-wing rumors in Berlin amongst silly parents about organized Rumanian abduction trucks are actively fought. Dangerous fakenews on social media, probably Russian.

i live in chicago and just stared taking my son to preschool on the local El train. Would love to do that when he goes to school.

Sorry, but this one&#x27;s on the parents. My mom would never put up with driving us in every day. It was either take the bus or walk, you lazy kid.

Putting so much emphasis on cars, and being in cars is a national embarrassment

Fortunately, there&#x27;s homeschool. In the amount of time it takes someone to load up the kids into the car, drive to school, wait in these long lines, and then do the reverse, that should be enough instructor-led time for an entire homeschooling curriculum.<p>The best part is, you won&#x27;t have to subject your children to marxists and people that look like literal clowns that fell face-first into a tackle box.

We can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm. We&#x27;ll look back on the primitive times when kids couldn&#x27;t just click a button or whisper an instruction for a ride like anyone else.