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.