If kids can’t get themselves to school by their teenage years, something is horrifically wrong with your urban planning. A school should serve the houses 1-2 miles around. My daily treks to middle and high school were parades of pedestrians, bikes, and kick scooters through the suburban streets.
> A school should serve the houses 1-2 miles around.
This tends to be how suburban elementary schools are, but high schools require more resources per school (for all the facilities for sports and enrichment programs), so there are fewer, larger high schools.
Having one high school serve only a 1-2 mile area would only work out if you have a bunch of 100-story condos in the 1-2 mile area. Otherwise, where are all these kids even coming from?
I grew up in a town of 50,000 people. The population density of it, according to Wikipedia, is 1,082/sq mi. The town has three high schools to serve its population, and they're all just about full. If it had more schools, though, then each school would have less than 200 students apiee. Where would the budget for these schools' facilities come from?
Condo towers? The suburb I grew up in was all single family homes with 2-car garages, 6,600 people per square mile and 14,000 people total. We have one high school in the center with ~900 students. Walkable for all of them. There are two elementary schools around half that size with even smaller coverage areas.
We were unambiguously a suburb. 1/6th that density would have been nightmarish sprawl. Berkeley, also mostly suburban, is 12,000 per square mile! That’s my point.
> If kids can’t get themselves to school by their teenage years, something is horrifically wrong with your urban planning.
i mean, according to the general sentiment of HN at least, there is something horrifically wrong with urban planning in the US. in the meantime, the schools need to settle on a "least terrible" schedule.
You don’t need to ban cars, build dense multifamily buildings, dig subways, live close to a central business district, etc. to be in a position where kids can walk to school. That’s still perfectly compatible with suburbia.
