91–100 of 155 posts
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Nothing special to see from an European point of view...
Huh? Is Boston not the classic car-oriented USA city?
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Isn't Boston's climate very similar to most of Germany's?
One thing I have learned from reading (and occasionally taking part in) these discussions is that no, it is not . The US is different . It is too big, too small, too densely populated, too sparsely populated, too hot, too cold, too dry and too humid for anything to work. It does not matter if something appears to work most everywhere else. It will not work anywhere in the US.
In Germany we're assigned to the nearest school. I remember walking to school in elementary school, later taking the bike for 20 min or public transportation. I don't live in a particularly dense area. Is Boston too sparsely populated to have schools in walking or biking distance? Seems that we accept distances of 1-2 km for elementary school walks. (0.6 to 1.2 miles)
Boston is reasonably dense, but it's also defacto segregated, with parts of the city having different racial and class makeup. If we went back to neighborhood schools that people walked to that would mean effectively resegregating the schools.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_cr...
Interesting - so is it "a thing" in the US that the city runs a dedicated bus service for all schools/students? Quite a surprise for me considering how poor people say public transport is in general in the US? In the UK some schools run their own bus things (in the same way that Goolge, Facebook et al do in San Francisco), but most of the other schools just get by with the public buses. There is often some coordinati…
Most US cities and towns have minimal public transit that wouldn't be anywhere near sufficient for getting kids to and from school, so they run school buses instead. In some places with good public transit, like Somerville MA where I live, the city doesn't run school buses and people walk or take general purpose public transit, but that's very unusual here. It's the same deal as the tech shuttles: in places where pub…
Good article on long school bus rides: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2010/10/04/long-bus-ride-cook-...
In Germany we're assigned to the nearest school. I remember walking to school in elementary school, later taking the bike for 20 min or public transportation. I don't live in a particularly dense area. Is Boston too sparsely populated to have schools in walking or biking distance? Seems that we accept distances of 1-2 km for elementary school walks. (0.6 to 1.2 miles)
Our state places elementary schools so young kids don't have to cross a major street, when possible.
Interesting - so is it "a thing" in the US that the city runs a dedicated bus service for all schools/students? Quite a surprise for me considering how poor people say public transport is in general in the US? In the UK some schools run their own bus things (in the same way that Goolge, Facebook et al do in San Francisco), but most of the other schools just get by with the public buses. There is often some coordinati…
They're usually part-timers or neighborhood parents volunteering.
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Well yeah but when you choose a school, you choose it based on those criterias. They cannot just change the schedule like this
It sounded like the hours were relatively consistent over the whole system. It wouldn't really affect school choice. But fine, if this change is somehow egregious compared to other ones, give a 5 year warning. The schedule benefits their kids, with a net zero change in the convenience of starting hours. What a shortsighted way to complain.
This is not how to build concensus for your argument.
I recently moved due to concerns outside my control, and the school time changed from 8:30am to 7:15am for my 6-year-old. This is manageable, but not a minor change at all. These types of changes are very significant for everyone in the region.
Interesting - so is it "a thing" in the US that the city runs a dedicated bus service for all schools/students? Quite a surprise for me considering how poor people say public transport is in general in the US? In the UK some schools run their own bus things (in the same way that Goolge, Facebook et al do in San Francisco), but most of the other schools just get by with the public buses. There is often some coordinati…
Here’s an article about some MIT folks who tried to do this and were shut down by annoying rich people. My greatest frustration is that they complain about black box algorithms when in fact it is a perfectly clear, ambiguity-free optimization function. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/joi-ito-ai-...
The thing is, all of these algorithms should be able to do well with arbitrary constraints. If it means saving less money then so be it. Many of these systems start optimizing some simple criteria and work fairly well. But with additional constraints they fall apart. Even companies that manage their own fleets for their own needs would like different things to purely optimizing distance/duration. They might want to b…
Interesting - so is it "a thing" in the US that the city runs a dedicated bus service for all schools/students? Quite a surprise for me considering how poor people say public transport is in general in the US? In the UK some schools run their own bus things (in the same way that Goolge, Facebook et al do in San Francisco), but most of the other schools just get by with the public buses. There is often some coordinati…