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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.
by ndjskska 7y ago
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)
- joe_the_user 7y agoBoston is different from this in a whole variety of ways. 1) Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia. 2) Boston's transportation system is broken on just about every levels. The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths. The public transit system was also built in an ad-hoc and is at level where full transit lines stop for days at a time. So all that's left is driving, though Boston drivers have a terrible reputation too! 3) Boston's weather is also miserable - the place is at just latitude so that wet, 30 degree weather prevails in winter, giving freezing rain, frozen rain, slush and all manner of nastiness. Plus horrible hot, humid summers. So you have to avoid walking a lot. 4) Boston experienced court-order busing to end segregation in the 1970s, so it's often true that students aren't in schools closest to them geographically.
- mac01021 7y agoIsn't Boston's climate very similar to most of Germany's?
- dspig 7y agoAnd maybe the street layout?
- ragebol 7y agoNothing special to see from an European point of view...
- TomMarius 7y agoHuh? Is Boston not the classic car-oriented USA city?
- msh 7y agono, too old for that (at least central boston). When I visited I found transport to be very european compared to other US cities I have visited.
- ghaff 7y agoYes and no. It's famously congested and challenging to drive in--one of the most expensive road infrastructure projects in the US ever (the "Big Dig") notwithstanding. But the downtown core as well as large parts of the adjacent Cambridge are actually pretty walkable and the public transit, subway in particular, is pretty decent. (Regular users rightly complain a lot about it, especially in winter, but then thats true of most cities including in Europe.) I live about an hour outside of Boston and have to go in for a few days later this week and I'll be taking public transit.
- TomMarius 7y agoThank you, I was sure I heard about these massive congestion. I'm happy that the situation there is different than in the rest of US.
- jefftk 7y agoNo, it's not. Most of the city, and close in suburbs like Cambridge and Somerville, were built before cars. This is one of the few places in the US where I'm happy living without a car.
- astura 7y agoNo... I've never took my car into Boston when I've visited, I've always dumped the car at the train station.
- msl 7y agoOne 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.
- DavidHm 7y agoA bit cynical, but not unfair. Many people in the US persistently cling to the idea that solution implemented and working (albeit imperfectly) in other parts of the world will not work in the US due to XYZ. Which in a way, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Solutions implemented in the rest of the world will not work in the US because most people don't believe they will, or that the US is not capable of radical change (that is, radical change not driven by an individual or a corporate desire for profit)
- rubber_duck 7y agoWell I mean comparing US to individual European countries usually ignores the fact that most of the countries quoted have homogenous population with numbers closer to large US cities like New York than the entire US. If you compare US to EU you see that EU is less rosy with it's own underdeveloped regions that and the difference between richest and poorest country in EU is probably worse than the difference between states in US, relocating between states in US is simpler, etc. etc. Also decision making at EU level Europe is waay harder than the US. So instead of talking US in aggregate why not do those changes state level where it makes sense - just like they are done in the Europe.
- dtwest 7y agoIronically, it is actually hotter, it is actually colder, it's all of those things you sarcastically point out. Except being too small or dense, who told you that? I'm from the American Midwest and I'm currently in Northern Europe. The difference is huge. The density issue of American suburbs is real, and the phenomenon is relatively rare globally. Go check out Google Earth. How do you not see it? The weather is also more extreme in most places of the US than Europe. When Europeans tell people in Wisconsin to "just take an electric scooter to the metro station" they understandably laugh it off as ridiculous.
- mattlutze 7y agoBoston is at 42.3601 N longitude, which is actually pretty far south-ish compared to Germany. For comparison, Munich, Germany is 48.1351° N, Barcelona, Spain is 41.3851° N
- seren 7y agoDue to the ocean currents, i.e. cold water coming from the North on the US East coast, and hot water coming back from the South on the European West coast, it does not make much sense to compare latitude on the 2 sides of the Atlantic. Famously(?) New York is at the same latitude that Naples, they definitely don't have the same climate.
- poooogles 7y agoLongitude in itself doesn't dictate weather. Labrador is the same longitude as London but we don't have similar climates. Köppen climate classification is probably the best indicator of where else is similar; which comes out as the same as most of northern Europe [1]. 1. https://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather-summary.php3?s=90527&cityname=Boston,+Massachusetts,+United+States+of+America https://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather-summary.php3?s=9...
- umanwizard 7y agoYou mean latitude.
- mattlutze 7y agoYou're absolutely right (we both meant that)
- mattlutze 7y agoLatitude doesn't, you're right, though the map on the site you linked shows broad-strokes correlation, and I've found it helpful if I guess imprecise in illustrating general temperature differences. The difference in summers - cool summer vs hot summer - is a big one, and I'd suggest that it makes Boston's climate not really the same as most of northern Europe. We haven't traditionally needed air conditioning in Germany, for example, while I understand Boston and New England (the upper mid-Atlantic and New York, surely, when I lived and visited there) come to rely on it during the summer months to not just live in puddles of sweat.
- tom_mellior 7y agoIt does look rainier than Munich, say: https://www.weather2travel.com/weather-comparison/?placename1=Boston%2C+Massachusetts%2C+USA&p1=1452&placename2=Munich%2C+Germany&p2=3176#compare-weather https://www.weather2travel.com/weather-comparison/?placename...
- Swizec 7y ago> 1) Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia. Is it true that in some places this paranoia has gotten so far that you’ll get reported to child services if you let your kids walk to school? > 3) Boston's weather is also miserable - the place is at just latitude so that wet, 30 degree weather prevails in winter, giving freezing rain, frozen rain, slush and all manner of nastiness. Plus horrible hot, humid summers. So you have to avoid walking a lot. In Slovenia, same latitude as Montreal, I walked to school and back every day for 16 years. Yes even college. What’s the problem with walking a kilometer or two in ... weather? Sometimes it rains, sometimes it snows, slush in spring, hot in summer ... so what? Just dress appropriately. I have fond memories of early spring where you walk to school in a winter jacket and back from school in a t-shirt jacket in hand.
- lonnyk 7y ago> What’s the problem with walking a kilometer or two Where I grew up in New Jersey I lived 2 miles (3.2 KM) from school and I was considered close to the school. Those who lived within a 10-20 minute walk would walk. Many of us who lived further away would rely on the bus. Edit: And this was for elementary and middle school (up to age 13). From ages 14-18 everyone was significantly further away.
- ido 7y agoAssuming you were in a city rather than a rural area, is it because US school are larger & fewer? Nowhere in my hometown (250k mid-sized city) is more than 10-15 minutes walk from a school.
- andrepd 7y ago>The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths. Isn't thus true of any European city?
- Dumblydorr 7y agoNot any, many were rebuilt after bombings in WW2. Even so, Germany is known for splendid trains, meanwhile Bostons trains are notoriously bad. My old company was off the red line and numerous employees were delayed at least once a week due to the red line sucking.
- ghaff 7y agoYou'll find people who regularly use public transit in many European cities complaining about their transit systems too. Boston isn't great, especially in the winter. (I used to have to use it on a regular basis.) But if I'm being fair Boston isn't "notoriously bad" unless you're setting the bar at the level of a relative handful of world cities.
- rsynnott 7y agoWhile many European cities were substantially rebuilt after WW2, the existing layout was usually retained.
- magashna 7y agoBoston and metro Boston also have a pretty high population density, so it doesn't help that early roads were laid out by cud chewing surveyors.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago>Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia. This is really just an upper middle class thing. >The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths. The public transit system was also built in an ad-hoc and is at level where full transit lines stop for days at a time. So all that's left is driving, though Boston drivers have a terrible reputation too! The smallest streets are haphazard. The big stuff was all planned out to make the overall system function well, got 80% done then some special interests kicked money to the right politicians and they stopped progress at 85%. Ditto for the subway. Every couple decades they come up with a grand plan to make it not suck then special interests compromise it out of existence. Boston drivers are fine once you've been there long enough to understand the unwritten rules. If you're naive and think you can follow the letter of the law you will have a bad time. >Boston's weather is also miserable - the place is at just latitude so that wet, 30 degree weather prevails in winter, giving freezing rain, frozen rain, slush and all manner of nastiness. Plus horrible hot, humid summers. So you have to avoid walking a lot. The weather is fine. Kids are much more tolerant of weather extremes than their white collar parents (the ones who dominate the debate over this kind of thing) who's days are spent in three different climate controlled boxes (house/apartment, car, office). If you do it every day it's really not a big deal.
- chaosbutters 7y agoidk about Boston, but in Florida, I walked ~1km to elementary school, 15 minute bus to middle school (11-13 yrs old), and then had a 40 km drive/bus to high school. While if I had stayed and lived in michigan, I would have been 1km walk from elementary, middle, and high school. With a university 5km away. It all depends on the US city and state and how that community developed/organized.
- jefftk 7y ago> Is Boston too sparsely populated to have schools in walking or biking distance? 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_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_cr...
- fluffything 7y agoSo Boston combats segregation by making children commute for longer ? Does that also apply to privileged families ? (I assume those would send children to private schools, avoiding such a system).
- jefftk 7y ago> So Boston combats segregation by making children commute for longer ? Yes, and not just Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing > Does that also apply to privileged families? Sometimes. Other times places close the schools in poor/non-white areas.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoLower grade kids in America are too. But once you reach middle school they can be bussed to larger central schools. And demographics shift rapidly here. New developments have lots of new families, but 20 years later there are almost no families. So schools that were built in new neighborhoods become empty. So bussing to even things out. Our state places elementary schools so young kids don't have to cross a major street, when possible.