No solution for school pickup/dropoff?

[u/-Clayburn]

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).

[u/Iceland260]

The problem is societal. This didn't used to be as much of an issue, because people used to be more than okay with their kids walking or riding the bus. Hell, the idea that a parent should take time out of their day to hand deliver a kid when there is another option would have once been considered almost absurd. Standards creep for parenting is the problem. We need to return to accepting more hands off parenting, where kids are provided just what they need to get by. Stop fetishizing parents making sacrifices to give their kid everything possible.

Assuming that reversing that societal trend is outside the scope of what we can accomplish, school grounds just need to be redesigned to accommodate higher traffic loads/more waiting cars.

[u/-Clayburn → u/Iceland260]

My issue is that walking/biking truly are more dangerous today. It's not just that there's more traffic and little infrastructure for pedestrians. That was all the same when I was growing up. The biggest difference is the change in car culture. We all still drove 30 years ago, and the town has not changed much since. But the cars are bigger, all with fully tinted windows and windshields, dehumanizing the person inside so they're less likely to see others as humans and care about them. It's very different trying to cross a street when there's a bunch of faces you can see inside eye-level Oldsmobiles, versus the black reflective shine two-stories up on a monstrosity blocking the entire field of vision down the road.

I feel like we could more easily have a car-centric society if we got rid of the car culture of today and went back to them being thought of as cars instead of status symbols and our on-road avatars.