| ▲ | xp84 3 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just to consider this on a small scale where, it would actually need to be implemented, one neighborhood at a time, I live in a medium-sized town where the school district has chosen to reject free land that developers attempted to donate to the district for the construction of schools, in favor of just assigning the families who move into these new-build homes to the schools in the other part of town where schools have ample capacity due to the large 4+ bedroom single-family homes mostly being owned and occupied by empty-nest Boomers. We live somewhere in between the "new builds" part of town and the area that has a bunch of schools, so the walk from our neighborhood to our assigned (and closest) middle school is only 2.5 miles, a 55 minute walk with 155 ft elevation change. This walk takes you across a road with a 60MPH speed limit, basically an expressway. The elementary school is a bit closer, only a 40 minutes, 2 mile walk, but same expressway. Oh, and they don't even offer a school bus of any kind. I suppose the gen-x parents killed that idea off 25 years ago because they were so worried their kids would be out of direct supervision even walking to a bus stop, so each child is chaufferred door to door, rain or shine, until 16 when they receive their own cars. I agree with you that all this is absurd. Kids are capable of walking to school and shouldn't have to leave a medium-sized neighborhood to do so. But significant demolition of neighborhoods and construction of schools, local grocery markets, etc. is the only prescription for our ills that would provide anything resembling an alternative to cars for the residents of the tract homes that make up a significant part of our car-dependent suburbs. This is why I think whoever upthread is arguing that people aren't exactly being reasonable expecting the America we inherited from the 20th century to stop stalling and transform itself into 1,000 Amsterdams. Even though the places that share that awesome non-car infra are highly sought-after. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | cyberax 3 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> I agree with you that all this is absurd. It's not. It's the right design idea. But it's just missing one factor that will make it far superior to ANY other urban model: self-driving vehicles. Imagine children being able to just get a self-driving taxi and ride to school by themselves. Or to other locations. All while having plenty of space at home, a yard to play, etc. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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