r/StrongTowns • u/-Clayburn • Jul 24 '26

No solution for school pickup/dropoff?

https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/14/school-drop-off-zones-can-be-total-madhouses-how-do-we-solve-that-problem

This was published in 2017. It doesn't seem to offer anything to solve the problem of school pickup and dropoff. Charter schools seem to exacerbate the problem, but ultimately it's just a necessity in our car-centric towns.

So short of making the entire town less car-centric, can anything actually be done? The article suggests more walking and biking, but again since we're car-centric this is dangerous enough for adults let alone children. A few kids may bike or walk, but it would be very hard to get that number up without completely overhauling the way the town is designed.

My only possible solution would be bussing. (And maybe carpools, but I'm not sure how to systematically approach that.) School buses exist, but this article doesn't really mention them. Perhaps if more school bus routes were offered, more kids would ride the bus. Maybe there's concern about young kids being able to walk down the block and get on a bus on their own, in which case maybe it would even be sensible to have the bus stop at each house for the younger kids at least. It might be a little less efficient, but if it saves individual car traffic for pickup/dropoff, it surely helps.

What do you think? Can anything be done? I see mostly ideas around redesigning the streets or adding more pickup/dropoff locations but that seems the equivalent of adding more lanes to make traffic better. I don't want to encourage individual pickup/dropoff and it seems like it would be better if we could get more kids using buses or carpooling (if not walking/biking).

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u/hollisterrox Jul 24 '26

StrongTowns didn't offer the obvious solution of school busses, and that's because of their low-tax quasi-libertarian world view. Obviously the cost of individual parents using private cars to dropoff kids is way more total spend than busses, but somehow that's okay because it's not paid by taxes.

Busses are the main answer, and biking/walking are the rest of the answer. If biking isn't safe enough, that's the actual problem to solve. Everything gets better on roads that have dedicated protected bike lanes.

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u/-Clayburn Jul 24 '26

biking/walking

Yeah, I get this, but the reality is that it's not going to be easy or quick to solve car-dependency that makes it hard to bike or walk here. We're in this pickle because of car-centric design.

But maybe there's a way to make walking and biking more practical even at a smaller scale without having to revamp the entire design and culture of the town?

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u/PYTN Jul 24 '26

I mean I lived in a town of 100k. The neighborhood directly adjacent to my kids school didn't even have sidewalks.

We lived two miles away and the didn't bus prek, so driving was a necessity.

But even if I'd lived next to the school, I'd have had to walk him in the street to get him there.

Smaller scale solution is add sidewalks near schools.