School Pickup Lines are Shameful
The College Towns blog show how a unique microcosm of American culture explains everything wrong with today's "Bigger is Better" philosophy
Below I am forwarding an excellent essay by
, who publishes the substack , which covers “aspects of urbanism and higher ed that do not often cross in other spaces.”In this piece, he unpacks all that is wrong with the modern world by using the American school car pickup line as a case study. I wrote a similar article—about how planners’ guidance on minimum school site size is suburbanizing cities and guaranteeing unwalkable developments—which was published last year.
Ryan makes a few novel points:
International students are aghast at the way America provides school transportation, how detached our schools are from housing, how absurdly large our school sites are, and how virtually every family must use a combustion engine to get to and from the facilities every day.
The pick-up line is now so ingrained in our culture that mommy blogs have popped up to swap book suggestions while they wait.
In most of the world, well more than 95% of kids walk to school, but in America, it is around 10%, down 75% since the 1960s.
Public entities seek to save money through consolidation, which has caused a spiral of negative externalities. Everything has grown larger: sprawling cities, the size of schools, the size of residential lots, and the land area per person. As a result, 2.5 times as many kids travel over three miles to school as did in 1969.
These larger, exurban schools now appear to be white elephants, requiring more extensive administrations and complex logistics.
Walkable schools require no school buses, while America’s schools require hundreds of seldom-used $500,000 vehicles, thousands of part-time school bus drivers, and maintenance staff to support them. For the rest of the world, this is unnecessary.
It is an excellent essay by
. I hope you enjoy it. Be sure to subscribe to his substack, as well as mine!
Thank you for the foreword! Much appreciated.
No kidding! I teach at such a school and my students trickle in from 745 to 10 o’clock. Because it is not a neighborhood school even though it is in a city fewer than half of them can walk. It also reflects a kind of infantilization that the families practice. I’m a high school teacher and many of the students act as though they are in elementary school. Thirdly, and not insignificantly, because smart phones alienate family members one from another, the ride to school is often one of the few times when parents and students actually focus on each other. Thus, parents are loath to miss the opportunity.
It is not a pretty picture.