8 ms·

I have been driving my children to daycare for past 3 years. I will be driving my children to daycare for at least 3 more years. Bicycle is not a viable replace

by xyzzyz 3y ago

I have been driving my children to daycare for past 3 years. I will be driving my children to daycare for at least 3 more years. Bicycle is not a viable replacement for this use case, sorry. My situation is far from unique, raising children is quite universal human experience.

stephencanon 3y ago
Many of us drive our kids to daycare on an e-bike. It works great. On days when I have to use our car instead for some reason, the kids complain that they want the bike.
adave 3y ago
It is and a lot of people do it, just more convenient and the norm in many cities to use a big van for small humans.
jdkuepper 3y ago
Counterpoint- I have three children (one still not biking in his own) and have exclusively used a cargo bike to cart them to school since Kinder unless it was exceptionally icy roads. That said, I live in a very bike friendly city now, close to their school, can afford a cargo bike, etc.
- dhdaadhd 3y ago
  What city? That sounds great.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    I might go more specific and wager "what Dutch or Scandinavian city?"
dgacmu 3y ago
I mean, maybe? I bike my two children to preschool + elementary on a cargo e-bike, weather permitting, and it's fantastic. Sometimes I take both at the same time, sometimes my wife and I split them up. Works great. When the weather sucks we drive or bus but it handles more than 50% of our trips. The cargo + electric combo is really amazing. The bike, a Tern GSD with a big two passenger seat for the kids, wasn't cheap ($6k) but it lets us get away with owning only one car using far less uber'ing, and is way less expensive and hassle than a second car. (This is in Pittsburgh - it's hilly and we have weather, but we don't have too many bike-hostile drivers in the city)
- dcow 3y ago
  But you still need a car for the other amount of time. Until that problem is solved, "we bike on a nice day" and it works 50% of the time is not really a counter argument...
  - tantar1 3y ago
    I live in a rural-ish area. School is a solid 15min drive, there are many steep hills and the nearest store is more than a mile away. My kid is at the end of pre-teen years and I bought an ebike, carful to get one that is legal for children to ride in my state. I also bought MotoCross-level safety gear(helmet, gloves, upper body armor, eye pro) The child takes the bike to school, practice, activities and friends houses when the North East weather cooperates. For me, the closest dropoff event is 4 miles. 1mile to drop off, 1 mile to get home, and the same to pick up. This milage increases rapidly as the base distance increases. I havent gotten rid of either of our two SUVs (NorthEast Winter sucks), but I have a remarkable reduction in gas usage. Selfishly, I dont have to stop what Im doing to transport the child. I didnt do this for ecological reasons, but to give my child some freedom and the ability to get out on their own. The ebike is 3 months old and has 350 miles on it already. Those are all miles that didnt come out of my gas tank or go into the environment.
  - adave 3y ago
    It is as that replaces 1 car, imagine if every family did that instead of 4 people buying 4 separate cars like crazy people.
  - dgacmu 3y ago
    Sure it is - it's less CO2, I'm in better shape, it's less wear on the roads, I don't take up parking spaces as much, and it lets us avoid buying a second car. (And it's a lot cheaper per mile) The perfect is the enemy of the good. E-bikes are good. They're not perfect on their own and that's ok. Edited to add: and I left off: they're WAY more fun! It's delightful riding around on it compared to being stuck in a car in rush hour traffic. :-) the bike is almost never stopped. and we get to say hi to more people we know as we pass by. Much better experience, even if a big rainstorm sends us back into the car.
breuleux 3y ago
I would argue that the root problem here is: why are there no daycares within walking distance of you? In an ideal world you would neither drive nor bike to it, you would just walk. Surely the large distances that parents have to go to get their children to school are not an inevitability but rather a consequence of bad urban planning.
- xyzzyz 3y ago
  There are a couple of daycares that are significantly closer to me than the one than the one I drive to. One is 20 minutes walk. However, none of them are viable options for me, for different reasons, which I could go into, but then people here will only start second guessing me, knowing hardly anything about my situation. Now, suppose I did manage to get my kids to daycare that I could conceivably ride a bike too, and suppose I manage to fit three on a bike, including an infant that’s not even one year old. What then, how do I actually get to my afterwards job? Yep, I still need to drive. Ultimately, I could probably design my life around the goal of not owning a car. I could move to a place that’s close enough to my job to walk (and hope that all my future jobs are similarly close), and also find a daycare that’s close enough. I would probably have to compromise on housing size, quality and/or cost, distance to my friends and family, my hobbies that require indoor and outdoor space, but why would I, when I can hit a pretty good trade off with everything else, just by getting a car?
  - breuleux 3y ago
    I'm not going to judge you, or anyone else, for doing what works best for yourself. I'm going to say one thing, though: I would appreciate it if car owners were a bit more conscious of the externalities of their way of life. When I walk or bike around my neighbourhood, every car I encounter is a nuisance to me. They are noisy, they are scary, they are everywhere. So it's not just about your comfort, it's also about mine. If I understand that your car makes your life easier, and you understand that your car makes my life worse, maybe we can arrive to a productive compromise rather than think that the other is out to get us. Thing is, the car-centric lifestyle, when taken to its extreme, is so space-intensive that it becomes the ruination of other lifestyles. The more people drive, the less amenities need to be near them, the more space is taken up by roads and parking, the less walkable the area becomes, the more people drive, and so on, until no one can walk anywhere. We have to be cognizant of that and make sure it doesn't get to that point. Part of that is making sure that e.g. as many people as possible have daycares at a walking distance from them. Now, if you don't have any daycares at a walking distance, do what you must, I'm not the one who is going to judge (what would that achieve?) But in the grand scheme of things, it highlights a problem. Let's keep it in mind, you know. Let's try to solve it at some point, maybe.
jackvalentine 3y ago
> My situation is far from unique, raising children is quite universal human experience. And yet your experience of it is totally foreign to me. There are a half dozen daycares within walking distance of my house. My sibling who lives overseas has the same thing. When my kid hits school age the local primary school is next to the tram line that will take me to my office.
baq 3y ago
It’s a planning failure that you have to drive to access daycare. Cities have been designed for cars so it isn’t really your fault that you need a car to live in it… but that doesn’t mean it always must be like this.
noelwelsh 3y ago
Biked my children to day care for their entire day care career. Please please please understand that infrastructure is a choice, urban design is a choice. These are not immutable facts of the world.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yetanotherloser 3y ago
Raising kids without driving them anywhere, but instead teaching them to walk early, walk often and walk far is also easy - and really good in lots of ways - unless you live in one of those awful places with no sidewalk/pavement, in which case move or campaign for one. Raising children without cars is still something of a majority experience in the world and was universal for millennia. They have legs, and are portable until well after you've raised them to use them.
stevekemp 3y ago
Raising children is universal, but the environments differ significantly. I took my child to daycare by pushing a pram 500m. Later I'd half-carry him, and half let him walk. After he was walking consistently he later started to cycle there himself, as I walked alongside. In a few weeks he'll be walking to his school himself, again a distance of approximately 400-500m - with only one road to cross. I've seen children take themselves to school from age seven by bus, tram, cycles, or walking here. It is common-place. Maybe that isn't possible in America because the houses and the schools/daycares are too distant. But that's certainly not universal.
- stephencanon 3y ago
  > Maybe that isn't possible in America because the houses and the schools/daycares are too distant. I live in a small college town in New England. I bike our toddler to/from daycare, our first grader either rides her bike or walks (about 500m). They’ll be able to walk to school through ninth grade, at which point she can ride a bike or take the bus or hitch a ride with mom. It’s definitely possible in much of America, if you simply choose to do it.
hyperman1 3y ago
I assume this depends on where you live. Around here, it's very doable. I see a lot of ebikes with 1 or 2 child seats, and carriages for up to 3 extra children or groceries. I have 1 kid, and we always went to the daycare by bike. Last year, age almost 5, I bought a followme, and it works great. He's 6 now. When we bike more than a few km or when it rains, he gets connected to the followme, otherwise he bikes by himself. My ebike did 2500km in what's now almost a year, easily paying itself by the gas we didn't buy. The car is mostly used for big groceries every 2 weeks. Most roads have bike paths. On the way to school, 1.5km away, there are still 2 places where we have to cross unsafe car roads. Ironically, one is the school entrance. I think 1 parent in 3 or 4 still come by car, and their driving makes it harder for the others.
- eezing 3y ago
  Do they use the metric system in San Francisco?
lukego 3y ago
Worked fine for me in my bicycle-friendly city.
mschuster91 3y ago
> I have been driving my children to daycare for past 3 years. I will be driving my children to daycare for at least 3 more years. Bicycle is not a viable replacement for this use case, sorry. In countries like the Netherlands, urban areas in Germany or anywhere else that has a public infrastructure not exclusively focused on cars (aka, the services required for daily life not being mega-sized and requiring a car to get there, but small and distributed) it is a perfectly viable option. Hell I 'member walking to kindergarten. On my own, in the outskirts of Munich. I had never been driven to school by car.
- fho 3y ago
  Yep ... "back in my days" we even walked to primary school (crossing two medium sized roads on our own in the process). Today the alternative are cargo bikes modified for child transport which become more and more popular around here (urban Germany).

by xyzzyz 3y ago

stephencanon 3y ago

Many of us drive our kids to daycare on an e-bike. It works great. On days when I have to use our car instead for some reason, the kids complain that they want the bike.

adave 3y ago

It is and a lot of people do it, just more convenient and the norm in many cities to use a big van for small humans.

jdkuepper 3y ago

Counterpoint- I have three children (one still not biking in his own) and have exclusively used a cargo bike to cart them to school since Kinder unless it was exceptionally icy roads. That said, I live in a very bike friendly city now, close to their school, can afford a cargo bike, etc.

dhdaadhd 3y ago
What city? That sounds great.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I might go more specific and wager "what Dutch or Scandinavian city?"

dgacmu 3y ago

I mean, maybe? I bike my two children to preschool + elementary on a cargo e-bike, weather permitting, and it's fantastic. Sometimes I take both at the same time, sometimes my wife and I split them up. Works great. When the weather sucks we drive or bus but it handles more than 50% of our trips. The cargo + electric combo is really amazing. The bike, a Tern GSD with a big two passenger seat for the kids, wasn't cheap ($6k) but it lets us get away with owning only one car using far less uber'ing, and is way less expensive and hassle than a second car. (This is in Pittsburgh - it's hilly and we have weather, but we don't have too many bike-hostile drivers in the city)

dcow 3y ago
But you still need a car for the other amount of time. Until that problem is solved, "we bike on a nice day" and it works 50% of the time is not really a counter argument...
- tantar1 3y ago
  I live in a rural-ish area. School is a solid 15min drive, there are many steep hills and the nearest store is more than a mile away. My kid is at the end of pre-teen years and I bought an ebike, carful to get one that is legal for children to ride in my state. I also bought MotoCross-level safety gear(helmet, gloves, upper body armor, eye pro) The child takes the bike to school, practice, activities and friends houses when the North East weather cooperates. For me, the closest dropoff event is 4 miles. 1mile to drop off, 1 mile to get home, and the same to pick up. This milage increases rapidly as the base distance increases. I havent gotten rid of either of our two SUVs (NorthEast Winter sucks), but I have a remarkable reduction in gas usage. Selfishly, I dont have to stop what Im doing to transport the child. I didnt do this for ecological reasons, but to give my child some freedom and the ability to get out on their own. The ebike is 3 months old and has 350 miles on it already. Those are all miles that didnt come out of my gas tank or go into the environment.
- adave 3y ago
  It is as that replaces 1 car, imagine if every family did that instead of 4 people buying 4 separate cars like crazy people.
- dgacmu 3y ago
  Sure it is - it's less CO2, I'm in better shape, it's less wear on the roads, I don't take up parking spaces as much, and it lets us avoid buying a second car. (And it's a lot cheaper per mile) The perfect is the enemy of the good. E-bikes are good. They're not perfect on their own and that's ok. Edited to add: and I left off: they're WAY more fun! It's delightful riding around on it compared to being stuck in a car in rush hour traffic. :-) the bike is almost never stopped. and we get to say hi to more people we know as we pass by. Much better experience, even if a big rainstorm sends us back into the car.

breuleux 3y ago

I would argue that the root problem here is: why are there no daycares within walking distance of you? In an ideal world you would neither drive nor bike to it, you would just walk. Surely the large distances that parents have to go to get their children to school are not an inevitability but rather a consequence of bad urban planning.

xyzzyz 3y ago
There are a couple of daycares that are significantly closer to me than the one than the one I drive to. One is 20 minutes walk. However, none of them are viable options for me, for different reasons, which I could go into, but then people here will only start second guessing me, knowing hardly anything about my situation. Now, suppose I did manage to get my kids to daycare that I could conceivably ride a bike too, and suppose I manage to fit three on a bike, including an infant that’s not even one year old. What then, how do I actually get to my afterwards job? Yep, I still need to drive. Ultimately, I could probably design my life around the goal of not owning a car. I could move to a place that’s close enough to my job to walk (and hope that all my future jobs are similarly close), and also find a daycare that’s close enough. I would probably have to compromise on housing size, quality and/or cost, distance to my friends and family, my hobbies that require indoor and outdoor space, but why would I, when I can hit a pretty good trade off with everything else, just by getting a car?
- breuleux 3y ago
  I'm not going to judge you, or anyone else, for doing what works best for yourself. I'm going to say one thing, though: I would appreciate it if car owners were a bit more conscious of the externalities of their way of life. When I walk or bike around my neighbourhood, every car I encounter is a nuisance to me. They are noisy, they are scary, they are everywhere. So it's not just about your comfort, it's also about mine. If I understand that your car makes your life easier, and you understand that your car makes my life worse, maybe we can arrive to a productive compromise rather than think that the other is out to get us. Thing is, the car-centric lifestyle, when taken to its extreme, is so space-intensive that it becomes the ruination of other lifestyles. The more people drive, the less amenities need to be near them, the more space is taken up by roads and parking, the less walkable the area becomes, the more people drive, and so on, until no one can walk anywhere. We have to be cognizant of that and make sure it doesn't get to that point. Part of that is making sure that e.g. as many people as possible have daycares at a walking distance from them. Now, if you don't have any daycares at a walking distance, do what you must, I'm not the one who is going to judge (what would that achieve?) But in the grand scheme of things, it highlights a problem. Let's keep it in mind, you know. Let's try to solve it at some point, maybe.

jackvalentine 3y ago

> My situation is far from unique, raising children is quite universal human experience. And yet your experience of it is totally foreign to me. There are a half dozen daycares within walking distance of my house. My sibling who lives overseas has the same thing. When my kid hits school age the local primary school is next to the tram line that will take me to my office.

baq 3y ago

It’s a planning failure that you have to drive to access daycare. Cities have been designed for cars so it isn’t really your fault that you need a car to live in it… but that doesn’t mean it always must be like this.

noelwelsh 3y ago

Biked my children to day care for their entire day care career. Please please please understand that infrastructure is a choice, urban design is a choice. These are not immutable facts of the world.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

yetanotherloser 3y ago

Raising kids without driving them anywhere, but instead teaching them to walk early, walk often and walk far is also easy - and really good in lots of ways - unless you live in one of those awful places with no sidewalk/pavement, in which case move or campaign for one. Raising children without cars is still something of a majority experience in the world and was universal for millennia. They have legs, and are portable until well after you've raised them to use them.

stevekemp 3y ago

Raising children is universal, but the environments differ significantly. I took my child to daycare by pushing a pram 500m. Later I'd half-carry him, and half let him walk. After he was walking consistently he later started to cycle there himself, as I walked alongside. In a few weeks he'll be walking to his school himself, again a distance of approximately 400-500m - with only one road to cross. I've seen children take themselves to school from age seven by bus, tram, cycles, or walking here. It is common-place. Maybe that isn't possible in America because the houses and the schools/daycares are too distant. But that's certainly not universal.

stephencanon 3y ago
> Maybe that isn't possible in America because the houses and the schools/daycares are too distant. I live in a small college town in New England. I bike our toddler to/from daycare, our first grader either rides her bike or walks (about 500m). They’ll be able to walk to school through ninth grade, at which point she can ride a bike or take the bus or hitch a ride with mom. It’s definitely possible in much of America, if you simply choose to do it.

hyperman1 3y ago

I assume this depends on where you live. Around here, it's very doable. I see a lot of ebikes with 1 or 2 child seats, and carriages for up to 3 extra children or groceries. I have 1 kid, and we always went to the daycare by bike. Last year, age almost 5, I bought a followme, and it works great. He's 6 now. When we bike more than a few km or when it rains, he gets connected to the followme, otherwise he bikes by himself. My ebike did 2500km in what's now almost a year, easily paying itself by the gas we didn't buy. The car is mostly used for big groceries every 2 weeks. Most roads have bike paths. On the way to school, 1.5km away, there are still 2 places where we have to cross unsafe car roads. Ironically, one is the school entrance. I think 1 parent in 3 or 4 still come by car, and their driving makes it harder for the others.

eezing 3y ago
Do they use the metric system in San Francisco?

lukego 3y ago

Worked fine for me in my bicycle-friendly city.

mschuster91 3y ago

> I have been driving my children to daycare for past 3 years. I will be driving my children to daycare for at least 3 more years. Bicycle is not a viable replacement for this use case, sorry. In countries like the Netherlands, urban areas in Germany or anywhere else that has a public infrastructure not exclusively focused on cars (aka, the services required for daily life not being mega-sized and requiring a car to get there, but small and distributed) it is a perfectly viable option. Hell I 'member walking to kindergarten. On my own, in the outskirts of Munich. I had never been driven to school by car.

fho 3y ago
Yep ... "back in my days" we even walked to primary school (crossing two medium sized roads on our own in the process). Today the alternative are cargo bikes modified for child transport which become more and more popular around here (urban Germany).