6 ms·

FWIW, there's no parking requirements for schools where I live and the effect is giant traffic jams on the roads outside schools during pickup hour. Hardly more

FWIW, there's no parking requirements for schools where I live and the effect is giant traffic jams on the roads outside schools during pickup hour. Hardly more "family friendly."

awkward 3y ago
How would parking requirements solve that? Would parents drive to the school and then leave the car with their preschoolers?
- mwkaufma 3y ago
  In the burbs where I grew up, there were huge school lots so cars waiting for pickup didn't overflow onto the road.
  - SteveNuts 3y ago
    That seems like a huge waste of space for the 99% of time it's not being used?
    - taeric 3y ago
      In a very real sense, you just described housing, as well. And, really, many functional specs for anything. Your car, for example, has a ton of money and engineering put into it solely for the case of a crash. Heck, if you own a car, period, you spend far more time out of it than you do in.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > In a very real sense, you just described housing, as well. But as a result of land use regulations. Historically it has been common for a family-owned business to have a shop on the first floor and living space for the family on the second. Then you, one, don't have to commute, and two, don't have to duplicate things like parking, kitchen/lunchroom, bathrooms, etc. But then we prohibit this through land use and make everything worse.
        taeric 3y ago
        I wasn't intending my comment as anti-housing. More pointing out that "unused for most of the time" is a somewhat useless metric. Though, I am curious on your claim. I agree that feels like a common thing that almost certainly has happened. I am curious on how common it truly was? Yes, we have some overly restrictive rules nowadays. I agree with that. I am less open to believing that large percentages of families lived the way you are describing. Do you have numbers on it?
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        Numbers only mean something in a context. Doing that is more efficient, but at the cost that if you change jobs you also have to move. So it tends not to happen unless either real estate costs are high (i.e. towns/cities) or employees are pressured into it for the efficiency benefit of a large employer (company towns). But the problem we have right now is that real estate costs are high, so many people would be willing to take the trade off if it was available. And in doing so would help to alleviate the high costs even for the people who don't, by reducing duplication and effectively increasing supply. "Unused most of the time" isn't a useless metric. It's possible to make higher use, and prohibiting that use is foolish when demand outstrips supply. Other times the cost of the inefficiency is worth it, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant or indistinguishable, it's just a trade off against something else. And even then there is no justification to prohibit it, because there is no need to prohibit someone from doing something they wouldn't have chosen to do anyway.
        taeric 3y ago
        You are loading the discussion, though? I never made an appeal to efficiency. I only pointed out that "unused most of the time" is pointless. Heck, for schools it is especially pointless, as they are specifically only designed for daytime use during school hours. Would be akin to worrying about how much space you have to set aside to support a stadium for sports. Similarly kept empty the vast majority of the time. And this is all begging the question that real estate costs are the reason for the child care costs. Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem. As I don't think I've said it in this thread, I want to be clear that this is all very appealing to my sensibilities. I want to think a reliance on cars is a huge problem in our towns. I want to think that we can do better. I'm not sold by the case that is being made here, though. And it makes me sad to see shoddy reasoning used to prop up things I want to be the case. Edit: And I'd still want to see numbers on how often people "lived upstairs" of their job. Unless you count "their job" as making their own clothing, which was rather common, I don't think the numbers work for it. Yes, you had some specific jobs that this happened for, smithing and the like; but many jobs have been service oriented for a long time. Such that this just wasn't a "common" as in "most people do it." It was "common" in "most people that owned a shop lived there." This can feel the same, but it is very different; as most people did not own a shop.
Lance_ET_Compte 3y ago
Why are you DRIVING your children to school? If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school. I am so happy that I was able to walk with my son to/from his elementary school (and kindergarten) every day! It was consistently the highlight of my day!
- mwkaufma 3y ago
  If you live somewhere hostile to walking, like Los Angeles, that's not an option. You're describing living somewhere that's already solved the car-oriented urban-hellscape problem a priori.
- antiframe 3y ago
  > If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school. I think that depends on where you live. In my neighborhood, we do walk to school. But, that's certainly not possible in every neighborhood. I have friends that live near stroads of fast-moving & distracted vehicles. They don't walk to school, understandably so.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- testudovictoria 3y ago
  I don't live in the city. Aside from not being able to walk to school, mine would have to wake up roughly 45 minutes earlier (60 minutes if we want to be safe) to catch the bus. We are about 8 minutes from the school via car. Between the lack of housing density and ugly school zoning, taking the bus cuts significantly into their sleep.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    I had the same setup growing up. Lived about 3 miles from school but was one of the first stops on a 45 minute bus route through largely rural areas. I got a lot of reading done. Your kid won't be harmed by sitting on a bus every day.
two_handfuls 3y ago
That seems better to me than paving a big parking lot just for the short time kids are dropped off. Plus this way we don’t subsidize those who drive at the expense of those who don’t.
- mwkaufma 3y ago
  The schools are not located in places that have walking access, so that's a "subsidy" unavailable to anyone.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > schools are not located in places that have walking access Busses.
    - taeric 3y ago
      And just don't ever have events at the school for families to go to? Or are we talking not just "school busses" at this point? I'm all for public transit. Is a heavy lift for a lot of urban locations, though. And certainly not in the budget control of most schools.
      - brewdad 3y ago
        My kid's middle school had a small lot for staff and about a dozen additional spaces. Overflow parking was on the street. Zero need for a giant parking lot. If grandma can't walk the two blocks, then drop her off closer. Everyone else is less than 5 minutes from the school the handful of times a year there was a schoolwide event. The high school had a giant parking lot but it was completely filled with student's cars and had a waitlist for permits.
        taeric 3y ago
        The schools I remember from denser city living would have had you parking far more than 2 blocks away. Sadly, there was also a fair bit of crime not far away, either. :( Some of the schools I remember, had neighborhoods that would get swamped with people parking all over the street. Many of the locals would get rather annoyed with it. Thankfully, this wasn't that common. Even in the rural districts I'm in, now, there is no legal parking for many blocks around. Thankfully, nobody cares and the street becomes the overflow parking. Note, I am not complaining on this. I like that nobody gets into a fuss over the few times a year people park on the street like crazy.
dublinben 3y ago
This wasn't a problem when students rode school busses instead of being individually chauffeured. Alternatively, Paris solved this problem by closing the nearby streets to cars, so the students can safely walk to school.
- mwkaufma 3y ago
  The busses aren't running because our spendthrift government "cut spending" to enable property tax cuts. This is a big unspoken part of the charter-school transition.
- Jach 3y ago
  How far back are you going? It was a problem in the 90s and early 2000s, even with multiple buses. It doesn't take very many parents to pick up or drop off at once to create a traffic jam. What amazed me was how many parents just accepted the jam instead of dropping off or picking up about a block away.
occz 3y ago
Pickup hour is a concept that does not exist in countries with reasonable urban planning. It's self-inflicted harm.
- mwkaufma 3y ago
  No disagreement here, but the question is how to escape the world we're in, not just dismiss it as someone-else's-problem.
  - davidw 3y ago
    By eliminating parking requirements. You can't make meaningful progress on other things while continuing to force one mode of transportation on everyone.
  - badwolf 3y ago
    Schoolbusses are one option to mitigate this specific issue...
  - jellicle 3y ago
    Just... stop self-inflicting? Double school bus spending, ban parental pickup or drop off, organize walking school buses for closer kids, give out free child transit passes... poof! The morning and afternoon traffic jams go away.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      > ban parental pickup or drop off Have you never attended a school board meeting? Even if you had a hundred times more influence in this world and spent the rest of your life focused solely on this goal, I wouldn’t wager higher than 50/50 odds for actually implementing this in the typical school district, for more than a few weeks.
    - cafard 3y ago
      But the swim team practices at 6 am, the football practice runs until 5 pm, and band kids have to be back at school at 6:30 for a 7:30 concert.
seszett 3y ago
In my place (a large city in Europe) there is no parking for schools and only a handful of parents sometimes come with cars, presumably because they drive on to their workplace afterwards. Most people by far come on foot, the rest with bicycles (in my case, for some reasons we didn't pick the school closest to us so it's about 5 minutes away by bike, 15 minutes by foot). In my home country (more car-centric, but still in Europe) many cities now close the school streets to cars during drop off and pickup hours. I'm thinking maybe your place has much fewer but larger schools, so people cannot simply come by foot to the school. It's economically more efficient, but I don't think it's better for the children.
- mwkaufma 3y ago
  In our region of the US, charter schools have come in and fucked up the whole process so we can't even make those kinds of reasonable municipal policy choices.
  - seszett 3y ago
    I think here in Belgium private schools are just a bit more common than public schools (56% private from a quick Google search) but I don't think they are very different. (although in my opinion the very existence of private schools is weird, as they're not that common where I come from). Why would they affect anything in particular? Here I think they are slightly fewer, so spaced further apart and larger than public schools, but not by a very much. They are not totally independent though (no schools are, even the really private ones that don't receive any subsidies, like the French school around here, they still have to teach mostly the same things as the others).
smeej 3y ago
How does parking fix this, though? The same number of cars need to arrive and leave at approximately the same time. Each car takes up the same amount of space. And it's not like children can all just run around the parking lot looking for their own parent's car, which is almost certainly in a different place than it was at drop-off, never mind the danger of having a parking lot full of lost children wandering around.
- r00fus 3y ago
  Schools can stagger end times for various grades or subpopulations. My high school kid has this going on. Pickup is a non-issue.
- taeric 3y ago
  Since you aren't expecting that many cars to be parked, necessarily, you can take advantage of the parking lot to provide a queuing area for the cars that are showing up. Yes, you probably want it done in such a way that cars can, in fact, also park during events. But it doesn't have to be a fixed configuration lot.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  Larger parking lots collect the queue with them.

FWIW, there's no parking requirements for schools where I live and the effect is giant traffic jams on the roads outside schools during pickup hour. Hardly more "family friendly."

awkward 3y ago

How would parking requirements solve that? Would parents drive to the school and then leave the car with their preschoolers?

mwkaufma 3y ago
In the burbs where I grew up, there were huge school lots so cars waiting for pickup didn't overflow onto the road.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  That seems like a huge waste of space for the 99% of time it's not being used?
  - taeric 3y ago
    In a very real sense, you just described housing, as well. And, really, many functional specs for anything. Your car, for example, has a ton of money and engineering put into it solely for the case of a crash. Heck, if you own a car, period, you spend far more time out of it than you do in.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > In a very real sense, you just described housing, as well. But as a result of land use regulations. Historically it has been common for a family-owned business to have a shop on the first floor and living space for the family on the second. Then you, one, don't have to commute, and two, don't have to duplicate things like parking, kitchen/lunchroom, bathrooms, etc. But then we prohibit this through land use and make everything worse.
      - taeric 3y ago
        I wasn't intending my comment as anti-housing. More pointing out that "unused for most of the time" is a somewhat useless metric. Though, I am curious on your claim. I agree that feels like a common thing that almost certainly has happened. I am curious on how common it truly was? Yes, we have some overly restrictive rules nowadays. I agree with that. I am less open to believing that large percentages of families lived the way you are describing. Do you have numbers on it?
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        Numbers only mean something in a context. Doing that is more efficient, but at the cost that if you change jobs you also have to move. So it tends not to happen unless either real estate costs are high (i.e. towns/cities) or employees are pressured into it for the efficiency benefit of a large employer (company towns). But the problem we have right now is that real estate costs are high, so many people would be willing to take the trade off if it was available. And in doing so would help to alleviate the high costs even for the people who don't, by reducing duplication and effectively increasing supply. "Unused most of the time" isn't a useless metric. It's possible to make higher use, and prohibiting that use is foolish when demand outstrips supply. Other times the cost of the inefficiency is worth it, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant or indistinguishable, it's just a trade off against something else. And even then there is no justification to prohibit it, because there is no need to prohibit someone from doing something they wouldn't have chosen to do anyway.
        taeric 3y ago
        You are loading the discussion, though? I never made an appeal to efficiency. I only pointed out that "unused most of the time" is pointless. Heck, for schools it is especially pointless, as they are specifically only designed for daytime use during school hours. Would be akin to worrying about how much space you have to set aside to support a stadium for sports. Similarly kept empty the vast majority of the time. And this is all begging the question that real estate costs are the reason for the child care costs. Per another thread, 70% of costs in child care goes to staffing. Already this calls into heavy question whether or not real estate rules are the main problem. As I don't think I've said it in this thread, I want to be clear that this is all very appealing to my sensibilities. I want to think a reliance on cars is a huge problem in our towns. I want to think that we can do better. I'm not sold by the case that is being made here, though. And it makes me sad to see shoddy reasoning used to prop up things I want to be the case. Edit: And I'd still want to see numbers on how often people "lived upstairs" of their job. Unless you count "their job" as making their own clothing, which was rather common, I don't think the numbers work for it. Yes, you had some specific jobs that this happened for, smithing and the like; but many jobs have been service oriented for a long time. Such that this just wasn't a "common" as in "most people do it." It was "common" in "most people that owned a shop lived there." This can feel the same, but it is very different; as most people did not own a shop.

Lance_ET_Compte 3y ago

Why are you DRIVING your children to school? If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school. I am so happy that I was able to walk with my son to/from his elementary school (and kindergarten) every day! It was consistently the highlight of my day!

mwkaufma 3y ago
If you live somewhere hostile to walking, like Los Angeles, that's not an option. You're describing living somewhere that's already solved the car-oriented urban-hellscape problem a priori.
antiframe 3y ago
> If cities were for people instead of cars, you could walk to the neighborhood childcare/school. I think that depends on where you live. In my neighborhood, we do walk to school. But, that's certainly not possible in every neighborhood. I have friends that live near stroads of fast-moving & distracted vehicles. They don't walk to school, understandably so.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
testudovictoria 3y ago
I don't live in the city. Aside from not being able to walk to school, mine would have to wake up roughly 45 minutes earlier (60 minutes if we want to be safe) to catch the bus. We are about 8 minutes from the school via car. Between the lack of housing density and ugly school zoning, taking the bus cuts significantly into their sleep.
- brewdad 3y ago
  I had the same setup growing up. Lived about 3 miles from school but was one of the first stops on a 45 minute bus route through largely rural areas. I got a lot of reading done. Your kid won't be harmed by sitting on a bus every day.

two_handfuls 3y ago

That seems better to me than paving a big parking lot just for the short time kids are dropped off. Plus this way we don’t subsidize those who drive at the expense of those who don’t.

mwkaufma 3y ago
The schools are not located in places that have walking access, so that's a "subsidy" unavailable to anyone.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > schools are not located in places that have walking access Busses.
  - taeric 3y ago
    And just don't ever have events at the school for families to go to? Or are we talking not just "school busses" at this point? I'm all for public transit. Is a heavy lift for a lot of urban locations, though. And certainly not in the budget control of most schools.
    - brewdad 3y ago
      My kid's middle school had a small lot for staff and about a dozen additional spaces. Overflow parking was on the street. Zero need for a giant parking lot. If grandma can't walk the two blocks, then drop her off closer. Everyone else is less than 5 minutes from the school the handful of times a year there was a schoolwide event. The high school had a giant parking lot but it was completely filled with student's cars and had a waitlist for permits.
      - taeric 3y ago
        The schools I remember from denser city living would have had you parking far more than 2 blocks away. Sadly, there was also a fair bit of crime not far away, either. :( Some of the schools I remember, had neighborhoods that would get swamped with people parking all over the street. Many of the locals would get rather annoyed with it. Thankfully, this wasn't that common. Even in the rural districts I'm in, now, there is no legal parking for many blocks around. Thankfully, nobody cares and the street becomes the overflow parking. Note, I am not complaining on this. I like that nobody gets into a fuss over the few times a year people park on the street like crazy.

dublinben 3y ago

This wasn't a problem when students rode school busses instead of being individually chauffeured. Alternatively, Paris solved this problem by closing the nearby streets to cars, so the students can safely walk to school.

mwkaufma 3y ago
The busses aren't running because our spendthrift government "cut spending" to enable property tax cuts. This is a big unspoken part of the charter-school transition.
Jach 3y ago
How far back are you going? It was a problem in the 90s and early 2000s, even with multiple buses. It doesn't take very many parents to pick up or drop off at once to create a traffic jam. What amazed me was how many parents just accepted the jam instead of dropping off or picking up about a block away.

occz 3y ago

Pickup hour is a concept that does not exist in countries with reasonable urban planning. It's self-inflicted harm.

mwkaufma 3y ago
No disagreement here, but the question is how to escape the world we're in, not just dismiss it as someone-else's-problem.
- davidw 3y ago
  By eliminating parking requirements. You can't make meaningful progress on other things while continuing to force one mode of transportation on everyone.
- badwolf 3y ago
  Schoolbusses are one option to mitigate this specific issue...
- jellicle 3y ago
  Just... stop self-inflicting? Double school bus spending, ban parental pickup or drop off, organize walking school buses for closer kids, give out free child transit passes... poof! The morning and afternoon traffic jams go away.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    > ban parental pickup or drop off Have you never attended a school board meeting? Even if you had a hundred times more influence in this world and spent the rest of your life focused solely on this goal, I wouldn’t wager higher than 50/50 odds for actually implementing this in the typical school district, for more than a few weeks.
  - cafard 3y ago
    But the swim team practices at 6 am, the football practice runs until 5 pm, and band kids have to be back at school at 6:30 for a 7:30 concert.

seszett 3y ago

In my place (a large city in Europe) there is no parking for schools and only a handful of parents sometimes come with cars, presumably because they drive on to their workplace afterwards. Most people by far come on foot, the rest with bicycles (in my case, for some reasons we didn't pick the school closest to us so it's about 5 minutes away by bike, 15 minutes by foot). In my home country (more car-centric, but still in Europe) many cities now close the school streets to cars during drop off and pickup hours. I'm thinking maybe your place has much fewer but larger schools, so people cannot simply come by foot to the school. It's economically more efficient, but I don't think it's better for the children.

mwkaufma 3y ago
In our region of the US, charter schools have come in and fucked up the whole process so we can't even make those kinds of reasonable municipal policy choices.
- seszett 3y ago
  I think here in Belgium private schools are just a bit more common than public schools (56% private from a quick Google search) but I don't think they are very different. (although in my opinion the very existence of private schools is weird, as they're not that common where I come from). Why would they affect anything in particular? Here I think they are slightly fewer, so spaced further apart and larger than public schools, but not by a very much. They are not totally independent though (no schools are, even the really private ones that don't receive any subsidies, like the French school around here, they still have to teach mostly the same things as the others).

smeej 3y ago

How does parking fix this, though? The same number of cars need to arrive and leave at approximately the same time. Each car takes up the same amount of space. And it's not like children can all just run around the parking lot looking for their own parent's car, which is almost certainly in a different place than it was at drop-off, never mind the danger of having a parking lot full of lost children wandering around.

r00fus 3y ago
Schools can stagger end times for various grades or subpopulations. My high school kid has this going on. Pickup is a non-issue.
taeric 3y ago
Since you aren't expecting that many cars to be parked, necessarily, you can take advantage of the parking lot to provide a queuing area for the cars that are showing up. Yes, you probably want it done in such a way that cars can, in fact, also park during events. But it doesn't have to be a fixed configuration lot.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
Larger parking lots collect the queue with them.