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.

> do parents think they're protecting kids by driving them instead of letting them take the bus?

Yes, that's exactly the sentiment.

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.

I never said it's a rational fear! I have never walked home alone after hanging out nor gone out to play alone except in our backyard.

Ah okay. My mistake.

That's fairly contrived. Schools are already very segregated by affluence and buss routes need to handle every student outside of walking distance.

So, the net result is mostly just empty buses, and wasted gas.

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.

Good public transport system solves or makes easier most of that.

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.

When I was in school in Los Angeles during the same time period there was no bus to take you to a private school.

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.

Many private schools don't have buses.