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The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

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Re: The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

#21

Post by Y_Y »

giarc wrote: post #4

I think this article misses the one big problem (as I understand it). It'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 "Car 315 is here", they then find that kid and dismiss them. Just do away with that. When the bell rings, send the kids outside and they wil…

Would be much more efficient to assign numbers to the child abductors instead, assuming that they are less numerous than the legitimate families.

Re: The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

#22

Post by ryandrake »

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.

Our family suffers this insanity, too. This is one of the few things my spouse absolutely refuses to budge on: she won't let our child walk, bicycle, or even take the school bus to school because of vague "danger" 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.

Re: The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

#23

Post by bongodongobob »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #12
giarc wrote: post #4

I think this article misses the one big problem (as I understand it). It'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 "Car 315 is here", they then find that kid and dismiss them. Just do away with that. When the bell rings, send the kids outside and they wil…

The traffic is caused by vehicles queuing up in line, period. The system you describe isn't necessary to cause the traffic. It's not the root cause.

But it does cause it because every car needs to get checked off. When I was a kid in the 80s, there were still quite a few kids that got picked up, but no one was picking them up from the door. They'd park somewhere around the school within a block or two.

Re: The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

#26

Post by mmmlinux »

aklemm wrote: post #5

Well that headline sums it up. After 10 years of dealing with it and wondering "how the f did we get to this point", it's satisfying to hear it called what it is. A small win in our family was in my son'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 sl…

"he decided" is probably one of the issues here. back in the day it would have been "this is what your doing now kid"

Re: The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

#27

Post by jimbob45 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #12
giarc wrote: post #4

I think this article misses the one big problem (as I understand it). It'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 "Car 315 is here", they then find that kid and dismiss them. Just do away with that. When the bell rings, send the kids outside and they wil…

The traffic is caused by vehicles queuing up in line, period. The system you describe isn't necessary to cause the traffic. It's not the root cause.

And the vehicles are limited by the roads that are available to line up on.

And the roads are limited by the school's ability to acquire land.

And no reasonable school is ever going to set aside any more land for a car line than is absolutely necessary that could otherwise be used to provide more school building/field.

Re: The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

#28

Post by trgn »

delichon wrote: post #3

We can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm. We'll look back on the primitive times when kids couldn't just click a button or whisper an instruction for a ride like anyone else.

I'm not in disagreement, robot cars would be awesome, but why do we need scifi technology here in the usa to solve something that is already a solved problem the world over.

It really is a mental problem more than anything else. The inability to imagine a virtuous public realm welcoming to children, conjure its value in one's mind eye, and commit to the necessary material changes.

Re: The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

#29

Post by JumpCrisscross »

delichon wrote: post #3

We can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm. We'll look back on the primitive times when kids couldn't just click a button or whisper an instruction for a ride like anyone else.

> can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm

I live in a well-to-do community where many kids are chauffeured to school. The problem isn't just the parents' wasted time. It's the congestion and lack of agency this behaviour bestows on children. Head to head, I'd bet the kid who can navigate themselves to and from school outcompetes the one chauffered in a robotaxi in novel environments.

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