cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10212084
Never wait in the school car line again. Here’s how. For the first time in decades, a small but critical mass of children are riding their bikes safely to school again in the US.
I don’t have kids, and I haven’t gone to school in…checks calendar…a very long time. WTF do some parents drive kids to school when there are school busses? What am I out of the loop on? We either walked or took the bus when I was a kid. Don’t the parents have shit to do?
A lot of places don’t have buses and the roads aren’t safe for kids to cycle anymore. The assumption is that if you’re a parent, you just have to “make time” some-crazy-how.
Thanks for the explanation. I should have known it’s the usual lack of proper infrastructure.
I rode my bicycle to school one day when I was 15 years old. Technically it was illegal, as I had to ride over a bridge where it’s illegal for bicycles or pedestrians.
But I got away with it, safely no less. 👍
In North America, I’ve never seen a bridge in my area be restricted from bicycles. I’ve only seen restrictions on the freeway.
Exactly. You can’t legally cross the freeway bridges in my area unless you’re in a vehicle. Which makes it legally impossible to get from the north side of the city to the south side of the city, unless you’re either in a vehicle, or you break the law.
The American dream!
That’s not the only time I crossed one of those two bridges on a bicycle. One time I stopped at the peak of one of them, to take a couple of photos.
Cops gave me the bullhorn and said “You need to get off this bridge boy!”
At least they didn’t arrest me, but they might have been worried if I was about to do something stupid…
No, I just wanted a couple photos.
The bridges in my area that go over the freeway do technically allow for bikes and they even have a painted lane, but it feels horrible biking there with cars going past at 80km/h in a lane skinnier than my bike handlebars.
In my area, the bridges are the freeway, running over rivers. So, there ain’t much option, unless you dare challenge the law, just to get to the other side of town. If you don’t have a motor vehicle anyways…
Let’s see a study of children killed or injured vs not waiting in the car line…
Convenience vs mortality
School drop offs increase danger to children.
A joint study released by York University, The Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto cites dangerous drop-offs on the opposite side of the road, cars stopped blocking traffic and double parking as cause for concern regarding the rise in collisions
We observed that in 88 per cent of the schools that we went to look at and with each additional behaviour it put kids at a 45 per cent increased risk of having a pedestrian collision
Of course the best mitigation measure:
If you can, walk your kids to school. Let your kids walk to school. The more kids walk, the fewer cars, the less chance of one of them being hit by those cars
Edit: study proper: http://news.yorku.ca/files/driver-behaviour.pdf
Well sure, when a bunch of dumbass behaviors like opposite side of the road are mixed in with drop offs there would of course be problems
Citing explosions in a dynamite factory as proof of your assertion is dubious at best
And what do you think is causing the dumbass behaviours?
Good. Hopefully this will put an end to idiot parents who illegally park in the bike lanes near schools, putting cyclists and kids at risk, just because they are lazy AF.
Just give the kids ulocks and teach them how to use them on misparked cars
Oh you sweet summer child…
I live on a bicycle street (legally means bikes have right of way, but not much more than that), but every morning at 08:00, there are a few, but enough parents that drive their kids to school, that it creates dangerous situations. Some schools here in the city even ban parents from dropping kids off by car, close to schools.
