Discovered this when looking for ideas on how to convince my kids' school to ban the car line, so I thank you for your advocacy against them. I do feel, though, that some of your arguments for why we should let kids roam free don't accurately reflect the concerns people have. More than fears about stranger-danger, the origins of the car line lie in the autonormativity of our culture that came about as a result of infrastructure changes over the last several decades. Yes, sidewalks are necessary, but what good is one if your kid has a distance of 5 miles to traverse and that route includes crossing several 4-8 lane arterials with heavy numbers of ever-larger, heavier and faster cars? I currently bike my kids (5 & 6) to school with them on the back of our cargo bike, but I can tell you from experience that it's stressful purely because I have to have a perfect record of defensive biking and carefully examine every intersection 100% of the time before I pass, even when I have a green light and cross traffic has a red. In an average week I probably see at least ten drivers run stop signs or red lights. If I wasn't fully alert 100% of the time, we would have been hit by now. No doubt about it.
We can't expect kids to have that same kind of perfect record of alertness, because the human pre-frontal cortex is not done developing until a person is around 25 years old. Of course I teach my kids to "know to step out of the road when cars approach" as you mentioned, but we've built for them an environment where they need to be perfect while refusing to hold drivers to that same level of responsibility. On multiple occasions I've watched drivers use the sidewalk in front of my kids' school to do 3-point turns, even while kids were on them. Should I teach my kids to be alert 100% of the time even while on sidewalks? How should I teach them to respond to drivers running red lights? Drunk drivers? Cars taking curves too quickly and losing control, as happens regularly on the bike-lane-adorned street about half a mile from us, where the property owners have had cars ram into their homes at least a dozen times in the last few years?
About 2 weeks ago I watched in horror as one of the "free range" kids you described biked out into an intersection right in front of his elementary school and was hit by a car. It was a daylighting issue: a driver was (illegally) parked too close to the intersection the kid was crossing, so he and the driver didn't see each other until it was too late. The kid was thankfully okay because the driver was moving slowly. Add an extra 5-10 mph to her speed or 1,000 lbs to her vehicle and I believe I would have witnessed a child die that day.
So does all of this make me more or less inclined to allow my kids to bike freely when they get older? The human brain is faulty--more so when kids are younger--so the only way to improve safety and encourage more independence is create a safer environment for them to explore. That's not going to happen through persuasion, or by ending shaming--as much of a problem as I agree it is.
We often forget that our environment guides our culture. The reason it's culturally the norm to run stop signs/red lights, drive on sidewalks, and shelter our children in cars for every trip is because we spent the last 70+ years engineering our public spaces to prioritize fast-moving car traffic at the expense of all else. So people adapted to that norm.
Vision Zero focuses less on culture and more on making fast, dangerous driving physically impossible. This means narrower roads to force slower driving, diverters to prevent people from getting up to deadly speeds, physical barriers to enforce intersection daylighting, pedestrianizing school zones using physical filters like bollards, etc. The solution to creating a better culture lies in engineering. It's happening in parts of Europe and is proving successful. And their kids are more independent.
Thank you for this thorough and thoughtful comment. I couldn't agree more. The best approach to solving any issue is almost always behavioral economics (nudge theory) rather than persuasion. Great points!
I like this post, and I wish ending car lines was a cut-and-dry thing. However, as a work mom who works full time as an urban planner, it is so much more complicated than sidewalk infrastructure. It's because the people in power in our society do not see the value in funding social goods in general.
The car line starts much younger than elementary school: it starts as early as six weeks old. Families without a stay-at-home parent or another family caregiver have to find a day care center (which there are a shortage of) that is available, affordable, convenient to the work commute, and meets the kid's needs and the family's goals. Because the United States has seen no value in subsidizing early childhood education, the scarce centers and schools that do exist are not in the fabrics of communities in the same way that K-12 schools are.
Then once your kid gets to Kindergarten age, there's the problem of school times not matching work times. As a society we had an opportunity to fix this post-pandemic by keeping 100% remote work as the default option: instead, companies insisted on going back to the office full-time or in a hybrid model. If a parent is working from home, they can let their elementary kids take care of themselves to get to and from school. Instead, they are jammed into a tight schedule of rushing everyone by car to and from work and school and before/after care. One example: a friend of mine lives just outside DC within walking distance to school and transit distance to work. He works 8-5 with an hour lunch. Once his company made everyone go back to the office, he had to start driving his kid to before care before driving himself to work and vice versa in the afternoon.
There is so much I want to talk about regarding physical sidewalk infrastructure. You would be amazed at how some school systems will say on their website that they promote kids walking to school but instead in practice would prefer to bus as many as possible in order to avoid lawsuits in case something happened to a kid on the way to/from school. They can use the lack of sidewalk infrastructure as an excuse for why they need to bus the kids.
This is not even taking into account how some towns and cities treat sidewalk infrastructure completely differently from roadways. For instance, in Baltimore City, sidewalks are considered to be on an easement and the responsibility of the property owner. If someone complains to the city that a sidewalk is in disrepair, the city will repair it and then send the bill to the homeowner! Considering how low the annual median income is in some neighborhoods, this disincentivizes people from reporting poor quality sidewalk infrastructure and having it fixed. Meanwhile, the city does not do this for roads - they fix them with taxpayer money.
Thank you for this well thought out comment. You're right that the root of these problems goes far deeper than sidewalk infrastructure and our liability culture is much of the problem. What you describe reminds me of something I've been pitching at a lot of my talks lately. Families are way too busy! Our norms and expectations have made life far too busy! The lack of community support has made life far too hectic and busy on parents. Schools, churches, etc. can help!
I found this while researching how to ban car lines. I actually can't find anyone that's done it.
My issue is that the buses get stuck in the car line, so the bus keeps having to get scheduled earlier so it can get in and out before the car line. People don't like getting up early, so they drive, which makes the car line longer, etc. It's a downward spiral. My 1st grader currently catches the bus at 628am for a 3.5 mile drive and a 740am Bell. He just sits at school for 45 minutes.
The only option seems to be to ban the car line except for certain circumstances like special needs or if someone actually misses the bus which could be allowed in moderation much like tardies and absences.
We have 680 students and 4 buses. They have the buses doing two routes already. They drop off one load then go out to get more. That creates enough issues. But the car line itself is actually why they've been moving it up.
Working class parents are the ones getting the shaft here. My wife and I both work. We have a 4 year old in daycare in the other direction that we have to drop off we can't go sit in a car like for an hour. But we love in an upper middle class district with a lot of stay at home parents who are totally fine giving up their time to sit in a car line.
As a side note, the bus drops off at 251pm and it's only 3 houses away from us. 100ft tops. A distance that I'm completely fine letting my son walk on his own.
However the bus drivers are instructed to not let kids off if they can't identify an adult to take them home. I work from home and one day I got stuck on a call and missed it by a minute or two. The policy is that they then have to take him back to school. Which is more dangerous? Walking 100ft or being alone in an empty school with an administrator that isn't identified. It could be anyone. They have no procedure that I'm aware of a kid comes back. That's 50 kids dropped off at that stop. Tons of neighbors that all know us. It's a safe environment for a kid to walk 100ft on his own.
Discovered this when looking for ideas on how to convince my kids' school to ban the car line, so I thank you for your advocacy against them. I do feel, though, that some of your arguments for why we should let kids roam free don't accurately reflect the concerns people have. More than fears about stranger-danger, the origins of the car line lie in the autonormativity of our culture that came about as a result of infrastructure changes over the last several decades. Yes, sidewalks are necessary, but what good is one if your kid has a distance of 5 miles to traverse and that route includes crossing several 4-8 lane arterials with heavy numbers of ever-larger, heavier and faster cars? I currently bike my kids (5 & 6) to school with them on the back of our cargo bike, but I can tell you from experience that it's stressful purely because I have to have a perfect record of defensive biking and carefully examine every intersection 100% of the time before I pass, even when I have a green light and cross traffic has a red. In an average week I probably see at least ten drivers run stop signs or red lights. If I wasn't fully alert 100% of the time, we would have been hit by now. No doubt about it.
We can't expect kids to have that same kind of perfect record of alertness, because the human pre-frontal cortex is not done developing until a person is around 25 years old. Of course I teach my kids to "know to step out of the road when cars approach" as you mentioned, but we've built for them an environment where they need to be perfect while refusing to hold drivers to that same level of responsibility. On multiple occasions I've watched drivers use the sidewalk in front of my kids' school to do 3-point turns, even while kids were on them. Should I teach my kids to be alert 100% of the time even while on sidewalks? How should I teach them to respond to drivers running red lights? Drunk drivers? Cars taking curves too quickly and losing control, as happens regularly on the bike-lane-adorned street about half a mile from us, where the property owners have had cars ram into their homes at least a dozen times in the last few years?
About 2 weeks ago I watched in horror as one of the "free range" kids you described biked out into an intersection right in front of his elementary school and was hit by a car. It was a daylighting issue: a driver was (illegally) parked too close to the intersection the kid was crossing, so he and the driver didn't see each other until it was too late. The kid was thankfully okay because the driver was moving slowly. Add an extra 5-10 mph to her speed or 1,000 lbs to her vehicle and I believe I would have witnessed a child die that day.
So does all of this make me more or less inclined to allow my kids to bike freely when they get older? The human brain is faulty--more so when kids are younger--so the only way to improve safety and encourage more independence is create a safer environment for them to explore. That's not going to happen through persuasion, or by ending shaming--as much of a problem as I agree it is.
We often forget that our environment guides our culture. The reason it's culturally the norm to run stop signs/red lights, drive on sidewalks, and shelter our children in cars for every trip is because we spent the last 70+ years engineering our public spaces to prioritize fast-moving car traffic at the expense of all else. So people adapted to that norm.
Vision Zero focuses less on culture and more on making fast, dangerous driving physically impossible. This means narrower roads to force slower driving, diverters to prevent people from getting up to deadly speeds, physical barriers to enforce intersection daylighting, pedestrianizing school zones using physical filters like bollards, etc. The solution to creating a better culture lies in engineering. It's happening in parts of Europe and is proving successful. And their kids are more independent.
Thank you for this thorough and thoughtful comment. I couldn't agree more. The best approach to solving any issue is almost always behavioral economics (nudge theory) rather than persuasion. Great points!
I like this post, and I wish ending car lines was a cut-and-dry thing. However, as a work mom who works full time as an urban planner, it is so much more complicated than sidewalk infrastructure. It's because the people in power in our society do not see the value in funding social goods in general.
The car line starts much younger than elementary school: it starts as early as six weeks old. Families without a stay-at-home parent or another family caregiver have to find a day care center (which there are a shortage of) that is available, affordable, convenient to the work commute, and meets the kid's needs and the family's goals. Because the United States has seen no value in subsidizing early childhood education, the scarce centers and schools that do exist are not in the fabrics of communities in the same way that K-12 schools are.
Then once your kid gets to Kindergarten age, there's the problem of school times not matching work times. As a society we had an opportunity to fix this post-pandemic by keeping 100% remote work as the default option: instead, companies insisted on going back to the office full-time or in a hybrid model. If a parent is working from home, they can let their elementary kids take care of themselves to get to and from school. Instead, they are jammed into a tight schedule of rushing everyone by car to and from work and school and before/after care. One example: a friend of mine lives just outside DC within walking distance to school and transit distance to work. He works 8-5 with an hour lunch. Once his company made everyone go back to the office, he had to start driving his kid to before care before driving himself to work and vice versa in the afternoon.
There is so much I want to talk about regarding physical sidewalk infrastructure. You would be amazed at how some school systems will say on their website that they promote kids walking to school but instead in practice would prefer to bus as many as possible in order to avoid lawsuits in case something happened to a kid on the way to/from school. They can use the lack of sidewalk infrastructure as an excuse for why they need to bus the kids.
This is not even taking into account how some towns and cities treat sidewalk infrastructure completely differently from roadways. For instance, in Baltimore City, sidewalks are considered to be on an easement and the responsibility of the property owner. If someone complains to the city that a sidewalk is in disrepair, the city will repair it and then send the bill to the homeowner! Considering how low the annual median income is in some neighborhoods, this disincentivizes people from reporting poor quality sidewalk infrastructure and having it fixed. Meanwhile, the city does not do this for roads - they fix them with taxpayer money.
Thank you for this well thought out comment. You're right that the root of these problems goes far deeper than sidewalk infrastructure and our liability culture is much of the problem. What you describe reminds me of something I've been pitching at a lot of my talks lately. Families are way too busy! Our norms and expectations have made life far too busy! The lack of community support has made life far too hectic and busy on parents. Schools, churches, etc. can help!
I found this while researching how to ban car lines. I actually can't find anyone that's done it.
My issue is that the buses get stuck in the car line, so the bus keeps having to get scheduled earlier so it can get in and out before the car line. People don't like getting up early, so they drive, which makes the car line longer, etc. It's a downward spiral. My 1st grader currently catches the bus at 628am for a 3.5 mile drive and a 740am Bell. He just sits at school for 45 minutes.
The only option seems to be to ban the car line except for certain circumstances like special needs or if someone actually misses the bus which could be allowed in moderation much like tardies and absences.
We have 680 students and 4 buses. They have the buses doing two routes already. They drop off one load then go out to get more. That creates enough issues. But the car line itself is actually why they've been moving it up.
Working class parents are the ones getting the shaft here. My wife and I both work. We have a 4 year old in daycare in the other direction that we have to drop off we can't go sit in a car like for an hour. But we love in an upper middle class district with a lot of stay at home parents who are totally fine giving up their time to sit in a car line.
As a side note, the bus drops off at 251pm and it's only 3 houses away from us. 100ft tops. A distance that I'm completely fine letting my son walk on his own.
However the bus drivers are instructed to not let kids off if they can't identify an adult to take them home. I work from home and one day I got stuck on a call and missed it by a minute or two. The policy is that they then have to take him back to school. Which is more dangerous? Walking 100ft or being alone in an empty school with an administrator that isn't identified. It could be anyone. They have no procedure that I'm aware of a kid comes back. That's 50 kids dropped off at that stop. Tons of neighbors that all know us. It's a safe environment for a kid to walk 100ft on his own.