The kids walking to school on their own thread

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Neither has sidewalks, so they seem about the same to me. I wouldn't let a 10 year old walk alone on either street.

Yeah, I don't see any difference in relative walkability. Similar lot sizes, road widths, etc. The only difference is the first Streetview has somewhat newer homes.

They both look like horrible walkability, but I'd let a 10 yo walk on either assuming that both of these sprawl subs have limited thru-traffic. Usually these types of subs have sparse traffic.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

i really dislike those suburbs that do not enforce building sidewalks.

yeah, i have a knee-jerk dislike for sidewalk-less residential streets too.

but some of that stems from being from chicago, which has got to be one of the most heavily side-walked metros in the nation.

even my relatives/friends who live way the hell out on the very edge of cornfield sprawl still have sidewalks within their subdivisions (not that there's much to actually walk to, but the sidewalks are still there none-the-less).

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Neither has sidewalks, so they seem about the same to me. I wouldn't let a 10 year old walk alone on either street.

Kids 10 and a lot younger even most definitely walk, bike, ride scooters and skateboards on the first type of street in my neighbourhood.

It warmed up on the weekend and I encountered a little girl probably around 6 on her bike by herself on Saturday or Sunday.

Neighbourhood arterials (that streets like I showed you lead to) all have sidewalks here, sometimes on one side, sometimes on both sides.

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5007...7i13312!8i6656

As for the neighbourhood in the Syracuse area that I showed, in terms of safety from vehicles I'd have to know what the situation is like in terms of speed enforcement and driver behaviour before I'd decide if my 10 year old (or younger) could roam freely there.

But in terms of abduction or assault danger (even if always minimal, I do think that even small differences in spacing between houses and setbacks from the street do make a difference in terms of apparent and perceived safety (and, simply, eyes on the street). Maybe it's just me though.

[begratto]

Originally Posted by ChrisLA

Today I would never let my child walk to school by himself and I live in the suburbs now. Honestly I would feel more at ease with him walking to school in the inner city, but in this day and age it will still be no.

Here in Montreal pretty much all kids walk to their elementary school. I have three kids and they started walking to school by themselves starting in grade 1, as did the vast majority of their friends.

We live in an urban neighbourhood where streets look like this : within 1km from my house there are 5 elementary schools. As Acajack described earlier (he also lives in Quebec, albeit in a different city), there are crossing guards all over the neighbourhood at any place where kids could cross a street. Few people worry about how safe it is. It just is very safe, really.

There are very few yellow school buses in the inner city, they are only for kids who live more than 1.6km (one mile) away from their school.

In Secondary school (equivalent to grade 7 to grade 11 in the US and the English-speaking parts Canada), kids use public transit. The métro trains and buses are full of secondary school students at rush hour. My own kids became regular transit users at 12, to go to school, go visit their friends, to the movies, etc. Few parents give rides to their teenagers to their school. The vast majority walks or take transit. And students driving themselves to school is unheard of.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by begratto

Here in Montreal pretty much all kids walk to their elementary school. I have three kids and they started walking to school by themselves starting in grade 1, as did the vast majority of their friends.

We live in an urban neighbourhood where streets look like this : within 1km from my house there are 5 elementary schools. As Acajack described earlier (he also lives in Quebec, albeit in a different city), there are crossing guards all over the neighbourhood at any place where kids could cross a street. Few people worry about how safe it is. It just is very safe, really.

There are very few yellow school buses in the inner city, they are only for kids who live more than 1.6km (one mile) away from their school.

In Secondary school (equivalent to grade 7 to grade 11 in the US and the English-speaking parts Canada), kids use public transit. The métro trains and buses are full of secondary school students at rush hour. My own kids became regular transit users at 12, to go to school, go visit their friends, to the movies, etc. Few parents give rides to their teenagers to their school. The vast majority walks or take transit. And students driving themselves to school is unheard of.

My own experience...

Living in the Miracle Mile District of LA in the mid-1970s, my sister and I walked to school, which was only a few blocks away, and we walked with our friends who were also brother and sister and lived 4 or 5 houses up the street. Sis and I would walk to their house, and sometimes they'd still be eating breakfast, and then we'd all walk to school together. This was 1st grade for me. For kindergarten, my mom walked me to and from school---I had a different schedule than my sister when I was in kindergarten. I had to think about it, hehe it's all coming back to me now.

Then when my family moved to the burbs, my sister and I took the school bus to and from school. In 4th and 5th grade, I witnessed some bullying on the bus, as well as some fights breaking out on the bus. Some of those bullies were just big assholes.

In 7th grade, I went to a Catholic school in the neighboring suburb, and I took public transit/the bus to and from school (with the occasional ride from mom to school when I woke up late).

In 8th grade, I went back to public school, and took the school bus to/from school---again, with the occasional ride from mom to school because I woke up late and/or had to finish an assignment at the last minute (I was such a procrastinator).

My sister is 2 years older than me, so when I started 9th grade, she already had her drivers license so I rode with her to school. By the time I started 11th grade, I had my own drivers license so I drove to school for my junior and senior year.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by begratto

Here in Montreal pretty much all kids walk to their elementary school. I have three kids and they started walking to school by themselves starting in grade 1, as did the vast majority of their friends.

We live in an urban neighbourhood where streets look like this : within 1km from my house there are 5 elementary schools. As Acajack described earlier (he also lives in Quebec, albeit in a different city), there are crossing guards all over the neighbourhood at any place where kids could cross a street. Few people worry about how safe it is. It just is very safe, really.

There are very few yellow school buses in the inner city, they are only for kids who live more than 1.6km (one mile) away from their school.

In Secondary school (equivalent to grade 7 to grade 11 in the US and the English-speaking parts Canada), kids use public transit. The métro trains and buses are full of secondary school students at rush hour. My own kids became regular transit users at 12, to go to school, go visit their friends, to the movies, etc. Few parents give rides to their teenagers to their school. The vast majority walks or take transit. And students driving themselves to school is unheard of.

My area also has a high school (officially) within walking distance but due to special programs offered by other high schools all over the city and also private schools you do have lots of school buses for high schoolers here. I think there are 3 separate HS school bus runs that go down my street every day.

My kids went to high school in a more urban part of the city, and while there was a yellow school bus available (for a price as it was a private school) we decided to buy them transit passes instead.

Like yours they started taking transit (all buses here) at the age of 12 to go back and forth to school and for occasional outings with friends. Not too late after dark of course, though if they were with a group we were more permissive.

Driving to high school (as seen in American movies and TV shows) isn't really a thing in Quebec as you only get your learner's at 16 and can't drive alone until 17 and some, even if you fast-track everything.

By that time, as you noted, most kids here are at the end of high school anyway.

[Acajack]

Looking at that suburban Syracuse area I posted upthread, it's actually significantly different from where I live.

I've already posted what type of street the sidewalk-less street leads to. It's a suburban arterial with sidewalks.

When you finally get to the school (from that exact same street I posted), the surroundings of the school look like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4962...7i13312!8i6656

(This is definitely still low-density suburbia, but if you zoom out you'll see that the school is surrounded by hundreds of houses within walking distance.)

Now back to NY State, if you walk out from that Syracuse street with houses on estate lots, you get the neighbourhood arterial road, which looks like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1760...7i16384!8i8192

And then you get to the main road where the elementary school actually is, and it looks like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1748...7i16384!8i8192

How is honestly gonna walk there?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by begratto

Here in Montreal pretty much all kids walk to their elementary school. I have three kids and they started walking to school by themselves starting in grade 1, as did the vast majority of their friends.

We live in an urban neighbourhood where streets look like this : within 1km from my house there are 5 elementary schools. As Acajack described earlier (he also lives in Quebec, albeit in a different city), there are crossing guards all over the neighbourhood at any place where kids could cross a street. Few people worry about how safe it is. It just is very safe, really.

There are very few yellow school buses in the inner city, they are only for kids who live more than 1.6km (one mile) away from their school.

In Secondary school (equivalent to grade 7 to grade 11 in the US and the English-speaking parts Canada), kids use public transit. The métro trains and buses are full of secondary school students at rush hour. My own kids became regular transit users at 12, to go to school, go visit their friends, to the movies, etc. Few parents give rides to their teenagers to their school. The vast majority walks or take transit. And students driving themselves to school is unheard of.

all of that sounds so much like the situation here in chicago.

CPS is built upon a backbone of tightly packed K-8 elementary schools with tight enrollment boundaries that give many students the opportunity to walk to school.

but the high school game is much more scattered, with a great many students at that age using transit to get to schools that are typically a bit further away from home.

here's the style of bog-standard chicago residential side street that my daughter walks down to get to her school:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9667...7i16384!8i8192

[James Bond Agent 007]

From kindergarten through 12th grade I walked to school every single day, with the exception of maybe 2 days in my Sr year in HS when I got to drive my parents' car to work. I don't ever recall my parents driving me to school, though maybe they might have done it a couple times or something.

The only time I ever rode on a school bus was a few times when I was scorekeeper for our HS baseball team (I didn't make the team so they let me be scorekeeper, lol), and we took a school bus to go to some away games. I think I did that no more than maybe 5 times.

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

And I finally got to realize one of the great joys of why we bought the condo we did 3 years ago: it's a very short and sweet one-block walk from our 3-flat to our daughter's K-8 school. Once my son starts kindergarten there next year, that will be our daily life for the next decade: a short little 2-minute walk to and from school. I've been waiting for this dream of mine for so long. I'm so close to never having to shuttle children around in a car on a daily basis ever again!

[dimondpark]

I walked alone to and from school starting in 2nd grade. Most kids in the neighborhood walked. This was Oakland in the early 1980s--our area of town known as the Lower Hills, bordered high crime areas, but was safe as the 580 freeway is like the Berlin Wall of town.

[plinko]

I seem to recall 1st grade possibly being the start of me walking or biking to school. Absolutely by 2nd. This was in Scottsdale, Arizona, one of the most suburban areas of the country with heavily traffic'd arterials.

Unfortunately where I live now (Ventura), we have a magnet school program so my 4th grader goes to school about 6 miles away, and my son will join her there next year in Kindergarten. Certainly not my preference and requires way too many car trips, but it's simply the nature of the way schools are run in this particular district. Sadly, there is a neighborhood school just 5 very short blocks from my house, but it is absolutely lousy and doesn't have a peanut allergy program (this is another huge problem for us).

[pip]

Originally Posted by begratto

Here in Montreal pretty much all kids walk to their elementary school. I have three kids and they started walking to school by themselves starting in grade 1, as did the vast majority of their friends.

We live in an urban neighbourhood where streets look like this : within 1km from my house there are 5 elementary schools. As Acajack described earlier (he also lives in Quebec, albeit in a different city), there are crossing guards all over the neighbourhood at any place where kids could cross a street. Few people worry about how safe it is. It just is very safe, really.

There are very few yellow school buses in the inner city, they are only for kids who live more than 1.6km (one mile) away from their school.

In Secondary school (equivalent to grade 7 to grade 11 in the US and the English-speaking parts Canada), kids use public transit. The métro trains and buses are full of secondary school students at rush hour. My own kids became regular transit users at 12, to go to school, go visit their friends, to the movies, etc. Few parents give rides to their teenagers to their school. The vast majority walks or take transit. And students driving themselves to school is unheard of.

I randomly moved the street view search around Montreal starting with your link. Montreal is fantastic!

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by plinko

Unfortunately where I live now (Ventura), we have a magnet school program so my 4th grader goes to school about 6 miles away, and my son will join her there next year in Kindergarten. Certainly not my preference and requires way too many car trips.

Yikes.

So that's 12 miles for drop-off every morning and then 12 more miles for pick-up every afternoon?

To me, that sounds like one of the circles of hell, but I have an unusually high hatred of driving. That said, I do understand that sometimes in life (particularly if you decide to procreate) you gotta do what you gotta do, even if it sucks.

Pre-pandemic, both of our kids went to a preschool a half-mile away that we could easily walk them to (sometimes we drove on shitty weather days), but then we yanked them out of there last March and we kept that at home for months and months and months.

Our daughter started remote learning kindergarten last fall, and this winter we finally decided that our son needed to go back to preschool so that we wouldn't murder him, but his old school had no slots open and the closest place we could fit him in is about a mile away. That's certainly a walkable distance, but to walk there and back for both drop-off and pick-up chews up a whole lot of time, so I've been shuttling him back and forth in the car for the past couple months and hating every minute of it (I really fucking HATE driving).

Now that the weather is nice, maybe we should start riding our bikes there together.

And in 5 short months he starts kindergarten at our neighborhood elementary school one block away from our home and I'll never have to drive a kid to school again in my life!

I can't wait.

[ChrisLA]

Originally Posted by begratto

Here in Montreal pretty much all kids walk to their elementary school. I have three kids and they started walking to school by themselves starting in grade 1, as did the vast majority of their friends.

We live in an urban neighbourhood where streets look like this : within 1km from my house there are 5 elementary schools. As Acajack described earlier (he also lives in Quebec, albeit in a different city), there are crossing guards all over the neighbourhood at any place where kids could cross a street. Few people worry about how safe it is. It just is very safe, really.

There are very few yellow school buses in the inner city, they are only for kids who live more than 1.6km (one mile) away from their school.

In Secondary school (equivalent to grade 7 to grade 11 in the US and the English-speaking parts Canada), kids use public transit. The métro trains and buses are full of secondary school students at rush hour. My own kids became regular transit users at 12, to go to school, go visit their friends, to the movies, etc. Few parents give rides to their teenagers to their school. The vast majority walks or take transit. And students driving themselves to school is unheard of.

It’s pretty much the same here most kids do you walk to school in Los Angeles. I walked to school, and while in middle school we moved to a new neighborhood but I continued to go to the same school which was 3 miles away so I took public transportation. As in Montreal, there were no yellow school buses in the inner city of Los Angeles.

I still live in the city of LA, but I’m at the very edge of it in the San Fernando Valley and although it’s not your average suburban community as I’m in a very walkable area of my district. The school that my son will be going too is way too far to walk.

Although I haven’t heard of any kids getting abducted, still I wouldn’t take that risk. I mentioned earlier I would feel much more at ease letting him walk to school in an inner city neighborhood. I’m sure eventually he will walk or even take public transportation once he’s older, he’s only 4 going on 5 soon and that’s way too young in my opinion. The other issue is people drive crazy and reckless in the Valley, it’s not safe for a kid who’s not mature enough to know the ways of navigating these streets.

[Shawn]

One of the things that initially blew my mind about Tokyo was the hoards of 5 year olds riding subways to preschool and kindergarten without parents. They can't even read the kaji signs but they remember their multi-line routes, station changes and all, no problem. I wasn't that mature at 5. Shinjuku and Ikebukuro Stations can still sometimes intimidate me at peak rush.

[plinko]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Yikes.

So that's 12 miles for drop-off every morning and then 12 more miles for pick-up every afternoon?
.

It’s actually worse than that since my sons preschool is another 1.5 miles past that. At least he only goes 3X a week but the drop off and pick ups are always different than my daughters school. Next year when he goes to kindergarten it should be much easier.

I work at home 2-3X a week so my wife and I try and split the drop off pickups. Otherwise she’s in the car...ALOT.

My firm is in Santa Barbara so I’m driving at least 55 miles a day when I go up there. At least it’s along the ocean..

[Steely Dan]

^ double yikes.

But yeah, hard to argue with that view.

Living in the city, driving isn't pretty, it's just aggravating.

Maybe I'd hate driving less if I lived out in the country somewhere.

[dave8721]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

For real.

My mind conjures up the ironic image of a parent saying something to the effect of "I'd never let my kid walk somewhere by themself, it's way too dangerous, they might get kidnapped" as they load their kids up in the back seat of the car.

Chance of random kidnapping: pretty damn small

Chance of car wreck: an order of magnitude greater

Cars are a huge danger to kids who are walking though. That's what Im worried about, especially here in Florida where we always lead the nation in pedestrians killed by drivers. I would never let my kid walk alone to school pretty much anywhere in South Florida until they are at least in middle school and more aware of their surroundings to avoid the maniac drivers. The times when kids would be walking is actually the worst around here too since thats when the bat-sh!t crazy teen drivers are driving to and from school.
My kids go to a magnet/charter anyway so its a 5-mile drive to get them there (can't wait til they get the school buses going again next year). I see kids walk to the school who do live close by, and its on a pretty busy street but its all the middle/high schoolers. I pass a good chunk of the older kids who walk from school and go hang out at the McDonalds or Ihop around the corner from the campus after school.

I used to walk (or mostly bike) to school in 1st grade all the way through 8th grade (took the bus after that) and I never had any incidents myself though in 3rd grade my friend got hit by car riding his bike right in front of me when he ran through a light like kids will do. He was ok but beaten up pretty good. Back then there were no crossing guards once you get like a block or 2 away from the school.

[dave8721]

One thing i noticed from looking at my old elementary school in street view is the bike racks are all gone. My kids elementary school doesn't let anyone bike to school either, they don't give them anywhere to put the bikes. At least my old middle school and high schools still have bike racks with lots of bikes parked in them.

[benp]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Kids 10 and a lot younger even most definitely walk, bike, ride scooters and skateboards on the first type of street in my neighbourhood.

It warmed up on the weekend and I encountered a little girl probably around 6 on her bike by herself on Saturday or Sunday.

Neighbourhood arterials (that streets like I showed you lead to) all have sidewalks here, sometimes on one side, sometimes on both sides.

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5007...7i13312!8i6656

As for the neighbourhood in the Syracuse area that I showed, in terms of safety from vehicles I'd have to know what the situation is like in terms of speed enforcement and driver behaviour before I'd decide if my 10 year old (or younger) could roam freely there.

But in terms of abduction or assault danger (even if always minimal, I do think that even small differences in spacing between houses and setbacks from the street do make a difference in terms of apparent and perceived safety (and, simply, eyes on the street). Maybe it's just me though.

See many kids, even younger than 6, playing in my neighborhood without a parent hovering over them, here in my city neighborhood in Buffalo. This is something I never saw in Houston when I lived there. Had friends visit pre-COVID, and they were in awe that kids were out unsupervised. In my old Houston neighborhood I saw parents walking their 10 and 11 year olds to school, and I lived in a good area. My in-laws moved here with their 11 year old twins from Dallas, and they have been "free-ranging" for the first time in their lives. They are attending a Catholic school that is a couple of miles away, however, so don't walk there from home.

Growing up in the same area I live in now, we all walked to the elementary school unsupervised, which was about 6 or 7 blocks away, starting in kindergarten. I did see a kid get hit by a car when she darted through parked cars, but that was one incident in 12 years of school. Starting in 5th grade some kids who were is special programs got bus passes to ride the Metro Bus to school, as there were no yellow school buses at the time.

Today there are fewer kids around walking to school, as strictly neighborhood schools are now mostly replaced by Magnet and Charter schools, requiring further distances for a lot of kids. There are also fewer kids around at all in my neighborhood than there were growing up as a Boomer.