John E

My local elementary school proudly holds periodic "walk to school" days. I live within 1/2 km of the school, and my kids always walked or biked, long before our street was designated a "safe route to school."

Square & Compas

This is not as uncommon as you think. In the Dakota Valley School District, which serves Dakota Dunes, North Sioux City, Wynstone Development, South Dakota and the rural homes between there and Jefferson, South Dakota has outlawed kids walking or biking to school. There is a very nice MUP going right in front of the school. I have it on good authority from the superintendant that he would love to invest the $50,000 a year it costs to bus the kids who could otherwise walk or ride bike in something more worth while. The school district literally has door to door bus service. Some of the kids who are bussed live less then a mile away and several are literally blocks away with a few who are only 1 to 2 blocks away. Yes they are picked up and dropped off by the bus.

dynodonn 

Sounds like my junior high days, I lived a half block inside the school bus dividing line making me ineligible to ride the bus.
Making walking and bicycling to school illegal would have been considered ludicrous in the early days of the President's Council on Physical Fitness, back when I was pounding/burning up the pavement walking or biking to school.
My parents would give me rides to/from school in the car on rare occasions, and I considered it a treat rather than their obligation.
The kids that I considered overweight in my youth, pale in comparison to what I see today.

Bikepacker67

He's actually pretty pragmatic.
And the picture he paints "World made by hand" doesn't sound half bad to me.

UnsafeAlpine

If someone took your bike and then told you what to do to get it back, do you really think that's acceptable?

kjmillig

In Alief Independent School District in Houston, TX children may not ride the bus if they live within 2 miles of their school. Many do walk, almost none ride bikes, and there are huge parental traffic jams at every school.

DieselDan

I'm sorry, but where is the data showing bike riding and walking is more dangerous then bus riding and automotive use? My school district had 6 kids die going in school related transportation in 2006 in cars, but none on bike or on foot. This is bull crap. You Yankees are supposed to be more enlightened then us ignorant Southerners.

Ngchen

My guess is that there is no hard data one way or another. Although, interestingly, this might be a case where the relative crash risks CAN be studied quite easily. The problem with saying that there were 6 kids killed in car crashes, but 0 in bike crashes, is that the numbers aren't normalized to the number of kids who did it. So if there were say 100X the number of kids who rode in cars, the 6-0 figure might not be indicative of much.

The problem can be studied more easily by having kids fill out a form noting their form of transport, and then watching over a year to see what number of crashes to/from school occur in each mode, and the damages done, and the distances travelled. Come to think of it, maybe this scheme would be the scheme to measure relative crash risk of bike vs car, with perhaps expansion to large employers and the like.

I-Like-To-Bike

The bolded phrases are essential metrics so often ignored by those who glibly talk about determining risk/danger levels soley from counting total number of "crashes" without any consideration of the damage severity or exposure probabilities.

nelson249

The trick is getting in on the action..... I have friends who are dedicated teachers and can't get a permanent full time position to save their lives.

Digital_Cowboy

That's just asinine. Did he tell you the "logic" behind not allowing children to walk to school? When I was in elementary school and a member of the church choir we would walk from school to the church. When I relocated to Florida from NY and was redoing my senior year there were a LOT of us who walked and/or rode bikes to school.

Rumpled

6 kids dieing going to school??!!
My gawd what the hell is going on around there?


At my elementary school of about 350 students, probably 60% of us rode bikes. We had huge bike racks around two sides of the school.

geo8rge

You are being naive. Public school decisions are made to accommodate adults. My guess is that somewhere there is a per child subsidy. They want to collect the subsidy.

I doubt anyone would, but if you challenged them in court I bet they would have to allow you to attend class if you did not take the bus.

ilchymis

How's that for a crazy generalization?

As someone currently doing IT work for an elementary school, I can tell you that 90% of the teachers I work with care about their students' education to the point of obsession. There's constant talk about the kids' progress during lunch breaks, teachers in different grade levels going back and forth about which classroom Little Johnny should be placed in next year (should he be put with our best math teacher, or our top reading instructor, or...?). There are at least two teachers at the school who paid more than $5,000 of their own money last year to fund educational field trips that the kids otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford. All this dedication to the kids, even from those teachers who had already been told that they won't have a job next year due to drastic budget cuts in our district.

I suspect that if you didn't see everything through the confirmation-bias lens of your frequently expressed political dogma (an important component of which seems to be the fervent belief that in all cases, "gubmint = bad") you would see beyond the few bad apples at the school you volunteer in, and marvel at the extent to which so many teachers really do give a damn. On the other hand, maybe your local school district has serious culture problems. But either way, it's absurd to try to extrapolate from that experience to insist that all teachers, everywhere, care nothing for their kids.

(And for what it's worth, our kids are allowed to bike to school. We even gave away four teacher-donated bicycles last year to the top students in our Reading Counts program.)

bkrownd

Kidnapping, sexual assault, drug dealers, mean dogs, inadequate pedestrian facilities, lawyers, etc, etc. I once lived 2.5 blocks from school and was required to ride the school bus for a half hour to get there, and that was in the kinder gentler old days.

kuan

How about cars slow down to 20mph in school zone?

How about cars slow down so you don't run over your kids' friends?

Blue Order

Misleading hysterics in the posted blog. Did Saratoga Springs pass an ordinance outlawing riding a bike to school? One would think so from the title of the blog post, when in fact, one school's policy prohibits students from riding to school.

cc_rider

One afternoon last year I was driving by a school when the buses were leaving. After waiting for a school bus to cross to the road opposite the school, the traffic warden waved me on to make my turn, following the bus. The bus went about 100 yards to the entrance of a townhouse community, stopped and let off about a half dozen kids. It then went another 100 yards to the next entrance and did the same. Then a couple of hundred yards and did the same again. At the next traffic light the bus turned right, heading back towards the school. By then the bus looked pretty empty. In effect, it went around the block across from the school.

trackhub

I grew up in the 60's, truly another time. Kids walked or biked to school. The only time parents would pick you up, is if you were leaving to head off to a family vacation, or something.

I find this all very bizarre. I'll bet the kids know exactly where the nearest McDonalds is, don't they?

John E

True enough, but for students at that school, the net result is the same. The affected parents need to complain to the school board, rather than the city council.

Blue Order

It's school policy. Given that, it may be something that's required by an insurance carrier, or perhaps is just intended to limit liability. The only way to know why it's school policy would be to ask the school why walking and biking to school is against school policy.

Yep.

TRaffic Jammer

I second the "let's grab all the bus subsidy we can" idea. The article is ridiculous fear mongering.
Forget changing policy at this point , how about a forensic audit of what happens to that 50K he mentioned in the article?

wnl256

So if the school does not permit its students to ride bikes or walk to or from the school, is there still a school speed zone on the street in front of the school? There certainly doesn't need to be since all the precious little babies are safely tucked away in busses and minivans.

geo8rge

Kind of amazing that one bureaucrat could wussify an entire school, and not be held to account in any way.

coldfeet

I would like to know what they can actually do to stop you. Mom rides with little Johny to school, say on an Xtracycle with tray bien.When they get to school, Johny hops off, Mom fits bike onto tray bien and rides home. Reverse at 3pm or whenever.

What control does a school have on what goes on outside the gates?

P.S. Tray bien is a mod to a long tail to permit carrying another bike as cargo.