The commute and school dropoffs are the real lifestyle killer I think.
Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things.
Imagine having that much more sleep (if you happen to be burning the midnight oil a lot).
I used to remember my parents letting me walk to the school bus stop (near our apartment) and then walking to work or taking the bus themselves.
Nowadays we pack the kids into the car drop them off at 2 different schools, and both drive to work 30+m away. We also pick them up. That's got to be 3h a day per parent. The picture complicates with after school activities. It's a wonder I don't WFH more often (which reduces my back/forth for kids to 40m total).
> Imagine having an extra 5-15h a week to hang out and do things.
I guess it's mostly car owners that waste their time commuting. To me, public transportation user, commuting is actually the time I spend on things like personal mail, HN, little googling and whatnot, so I cannot say it's a total waste of my X hours per week. Sure you're still limited in what you can do, and it's a different story in the US where car is often a simpler (if not the only) option available.
There are some things I pretty much only get done during my commute, like reading more challenging literature. Fun books are great when I'm falling asleep in bed, but deeper books require me to set aside time when I'm not tired—which rarely happens except on trains.
Nope. 10 mins drive to train here, so with margin of safety that's 20 mins. 50 minute train ride. 10 minute walk at the other end.
So 13+ hours each week.
As to being able to do stuff on the train - Maybe on some of the longer haul units coming from further afield where you get a table, power point, and elbow room, but on the commuter trains there's not enough room to work. There's a reason few people try to work on the L or London underground.
Best I can do is scan a few websites on my phone for 40 mins, and catch up (read only) on email.
I used to live in some area where public transportation required me 2x50min to go to work whereas it was about 2x15-25min by car. Bought a bike and turned that 2x60min but went down to 2x30min in the long run, when conditions are good (no night, no rain)
I can recount for you the story that I've heard from those in my area who have kids:
First, the most dedicated full-time parents decided to pick their kids up and drop them off, so that they would have more time with their kids and the kids would spend less time in transit.
Then, some unruly kids caused some trouble on the buses (the district isn't going to station a warden on the bus, and the driver has a route to keep), so some more parents started driving their kids. Now it was super-involved parents and also parents of bullied kids.
A huge fraction of kids get bullied, so now we're looking at a bus filled with the lower half of the parental protectiveness bell curve. Obviously that's doing to distill the troublemakers, further lowering the level of protectiveness a parent would have to have before taking their kids off the buses.
This forms a vicious cycle. The good kids are no longer diluting (and providing social pressure to) the bad ones, and the buses gain a (deserved? I have no way of knowing) reputation for being where bad parents dump their kids to be tortured by other bad kids.
Now there's a social stigma. The set of parents that drive their kids now include the very-involved, the protective, and the responsive to social stigmas. So, finally, the children of the poor (whose parents don't have the means to fall in to one of the above groups) are stuck alone with the bad kids - and now we're at our present state, where cars line up around the street and everyone is spending an hour trying to pick their kids up from school.
Maybe. But do parents think they're protecting kids by driving them instead of letting them take the bus? They're going to get bullied mercilessly as soon as they get to school anyway.
School is simply a horrific hellhole for the bottom 20% of kids. People just like to feel like it's not. And unfortunately "bottom 20%" can happen to anyone -- it's not merit-based. More like affluence-based.
The point is, parents aren't protecting kids by doing that. They're deluding themselves into thinking that it's effective when in reality the kids are getting bullied throughout the day at the school.
Well, it's not like the problem can be solved, so I guess parents need something to convince themselves they're making a difference.
> The point is, parents aren't protecting kids by [driving instead of busing].
Sure they are. A bus is a different environment than school. For one, the only adult is actively concentrating the opposite direction of all the kids, who have large seat backs that block view of all but their heads. That leaves a lot more room for... activities.
I took the bus a few times when I was in junior high school almost two decades ago. I faced very minor bullying every trip. At school 7/8 of my classes were "advanced" in some way (honors, pre-AP, AP, orchestra, etc) so I didn't interact with the kids doing the bullying. I can count on one had the times I felt bullied at school during those years.
Now for me it's possible I would have been better served by just learning to handle small stuff like that, but I can certainly see how a bus ride could be hell for some kids and then they'd be mostly ok at school (maybe just some incidents at PE and lunch).
If we're sharing anecdotes, I only got bullied after school or at the bus stop, never on the bus (at least there's an adult on the bus - usually none at the bus stops).
I think the bussing is avoided simply because it's a chicken/egg problem - if an significant number of parents don't opt-in, then they can't service the populace at large. In my kids current district they only bus between schools - if you live > 1mi from a school, you might as well walk/drive.
It is solvable. If society's violent toward one another then it's probably a symptom of deeper issues. I'd say:
1.) too resource constrained. There are plenty of studies suggesting ties between drier climates with stricter societies. Maybe desertification is a deep enough issue to address actively.
2.) not enough actual mental aid - for one, counseling parents of bullies. I realize this would employ a ton of counselors and I see nothing wrong with that expense.
3.) Look for ways to address the "it's cool to be stupid" meme. Ways to do so could include devoting resources to things like the FIRST Robotics competition.
> But do parents think they're protecting kids by driving them instead of letting them take the bus? They're going to get bullied mercilessly as soon as they get to school anyway.
Not a parent but I wouldn't expect to drive children to protect them from bullies but child kidnappers or other random dangers. I'm pretty sure that's why my parents drove me too.
Is that stuff really a concern? How many random child kidnappers are there? Don't children go out to play? And then walk home alone from wherever they hung out? I thought Stranger Danger was sort of a joke for many areas now. Especially considering people on HN are usually middle class at minimum.
I never had any issues walking to the bus stop starting in kindergarten. Though granted I almost never walked alone. Usually with a friend or two.
I'm in a much more affluent place now. I see parents walking their kids to the corner of the street of our housing complex. Seems a bit extreme to say the least.
Walking distance being two miles in the last couple places I lived... Which is probably fine for high school in areas with decent weather, and somewhat rural.
OTOH though, we have elementary schools in urban/suburban areas where 1/2 of the population of the school falls within the 2 mile radius (great saves money on busing!). Combined with high speed traffic, questionable neighborhoods, bad weather, a tendency towards overprotective parenting, and most parents of early elementary school children are going to be driving them rather than letting them walk to school.
The crazy thing is that most elementary schools are going to be getting out at ~3PM, which is far to early for most parents to leave their jobs, which means they end up paying a few hundred dollars a month per child in after school fees. A real problem for people near the poverty line, so those are the 5 year olds you see walking home alone at 3PM...
Driving kids less than 2 miles to school is a schedule issue, but not the kind of time sink described. It's also reasonable if a parrent happens to dive by school on the way to work etc. I simply object to the idea that having kids ride the bus is somehow an issue.
Our elementary school has no bus and the trip there is about two miles, mostly down a street with fast traffic and poor walkability. The drop off process is at least 30 minutes each morning on average in my experience, even longer if there are multiple kids and they don't go to the same school.
The school isn't built like a sports arena, so traffic flow around it is fine throughout the rest of the day, but morning dropoff in particular is very congested because the volume of traffic spikes for a single 15 minute period each day.
Coupled with general morning rush hour traffic, this ripples out to long left-turn waits (no turning arrow), congestion, angry drivers trying to cut down residential streets, parking problems, and so on. Then depending on how far away you had to park, you have to walk that distance with young kids.
Pick up time is easier, especially with after school programs, because the spike is diffused out over a wider range of time.
That sounds unusually bad. I don't know in your specific case, but I see parents dropping young kids off as the same block as the school. Or even across the street if there are regular crossing guards which provides even more surface area.
I can only suggest this is the kind of thing that's generally fixable by a local community.
When I was in school (90s and early 2000s), it would have been considered extremely embarrassing to have your mom drop you off and pick you up every day. I think it was about the time I graduated that things began to shift. When I was in elementary school, the was nowhere for parents to pull up curb-side and get the kids. By the time I finished high school, the elementary school had blocked off half the curb-side into a separate loop for parents to pick up/drop off kids.
Hah, even more so it was embarrassing to have your parents walk you just to the bus stop for me especially after 2nd grade (which was what separated our early and middle elementary school). Roughly same time period of school. We also only had one bus stop for a pretty big multi-hundred apartment complex.
Things do seem to have changed now. Or it's just that I moved. Not sure.
Two working parents means preschool until kindergarten, and preschool doesn't offer busses. If your district offers wraparound care for school-aged children, it's probably not served by busses. You can't have kids home alone any more because somebody might inform on you.
Inform? Wow... with our muni they would just assume some other adult was caring for the child at hime, unless they had reason to suspect abuse for some other reason, of course.
If your kid does after school activities the bus system doesn't help much. Add that to zoning issues where taking the bus in the morning might mean an extra hour in commute time (in many states the way to get around No Child Left Behind averages was to stick the accelerated programs in the worst performing schools meaning busing children across town to prop up averages) and a lot of parents end up driving both ways.
15h / 5 days is 3h / day -- 1.5 hours each way, that's a long commute.
The average commute in the US is 20 min each way. Suburbanites mostly jump to nearby suburbs. It's the urbanites & rurals who outlie, with interminable train rides or stops-and-gos via SUV & long highway drives to a bigger town an hour away.
I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project.
The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense.
Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.
Would you do it again if something awful happened and you all of a sudden were in the same spot you were when you did that work (less or none of your mortgage paid off or something). Just wondering. Seems like it sucked but worthwhile if it paid off 1/3 of your mortgage. Good job!
I have little knowledge about the truth here but I'd heard that this sort of warring stuff only ramped up after agriculture became common, no? Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer, but if everyone can hunt/gather for enough food, the motivation seems reduced.
OTOH if I can ignore preparation for winter and just raid your village for grain stores, the calculus changes.
The usual tribal conflict pattern is to seize territory as a hunting ground. Note that for nomadic tribes, there is no village and therefore no fixed location to raid.
E.g. the Comanches had a longstanding war* with the Apaches not because they wanted to seize each other's grain stores, but rather because they wanted control of the best buffalo hunting grounds.
* Not a war in the sense that we'd call it today. There were e.g. no organized charges, battle lines etc. Maybe "long slow series of irregular cavalry skirmishes" is more accurate than "war."
I am not an anthropologist, but I believe that's a popular misconception. Many technologically primitive tribal cultures have low absolute numbers of violent deaths, but they also typically have very low populations compared to agricultural societies. Their per capita casualties from intra- and inter-tribal violence are quite high.
Humans are Klingons. We in the developed world are currently living in a very strange universe unlike any before it in the history of humankind. Previous to the peaceful, violence-free lifestyle most people enjoy in the West everyone was pressed into sustaining the human war machine. American Indians had a long history of inter-tribal warfare to rival any European combat. It's just what humans do. Our apex societal violence is force-multiplied by a small group of people operating complex technological machinery, even though everyone else is still pressed into service and driven to exhaustion for industrial productivity.
> Why kill other tribes' members unless they have a hoard of food? I suppose "to reduce competition" is one answer
Yes, and not just for food and similar non-human resources. Reducing competition for mates is a common reason; even well past hunter-gatherer society, killing the men to take the women as mates remained a thing.
Tribal warring is common even in apes. Territorialism is especially strong. There are also plenty of things to war over besides food, such as space, shelter, mates, glory, gods, historical feuds, etc. Remember if we don't sacrifice one human before nightfall, the sun won't rise tomorrow.
Keeley says peaceful societies are an exception. About 90-95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option), groups of defeated refugees, or small enclaves under the protection of a larger modern state. The attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize warfare in tribal warrior society, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare.
The Hobbsian trap: kill them before they kill you.
Minor motivations and proximity are enough to set it off. And thereare plenty of motivations anyway: fighting over good hunting areas, water, gathering areas, and women.
The commute has been an issue of mine for a while - and listening to podcasts or audio books helps but, I'd rather just step outside to get to work. I blame this on where I live and my absolute reluctance to move. So yeah, commuting is my choice in the end.
Also hunger-gatherers lived right beside the people they knew. They just had to step outside to meet up with friends to socialize.