How School Drop-Off Became a Nightmare
6 min read
Stop by an elementary school mid-morning, and you’re likely to find a site of relative calm: students in their classroom cutting away at construction paper, kids taking turns at four square on the blacktop, off-key brass instruments bellowing through a basement window. Come at drop-off, though, and you’ll probably see a very different picture: the school perimeters thickening with jigsaw layers of sedans, minivans, and SUVs. “You’re taking your life in your own hands to get out of here,” one Florida resident told ABC Action News in 2022 about the havoc near her home. “Between 8:00 and 8:30 and 2:30 to 3:00, you don’t even want to get out of your house.” As the writer Angie Schmitt wrote in TheAtlantic last year, the school car line is a “daily punishment.”
Today, more parents in the United States drive kids to school than ever, making up more than 10 percent of rush-hour traffic. The result is mayhem that draws ire from many groups. For families, the long waits are at best a stressful time suck and at worst a work disruptor. Some city planners take the car line as proof of our failure to create the kind of people-centered neighborhoods families thrive in. Climate scientists might consider it a nitrogen-oxide-drenched environmental disaster. Scolds might rail at what they see as helicopter parents chaperoning their kids everywhere. Some pediatricians might point out the health threats: sedentary children breathing fumes or at risk of being hit by a car.
But the car line is not just a chaotic place with potentially sobering implications for our health, the environment, and, according to some parents, school attendance. It’s also a lonely one. In it, parents wait in metal boxes with their kids and honk at their neighbors instead of connecting with them. Families struggle on their own through what is, in fact, a shared problem. Solving it would not only build community but also make schools more accessible to those who rely on them most.
Fifty years ago, many kids got to school on their own, either on foot or on bike, Peter Norton, a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, told me. But starting in the middle of the 20th century, school districts began to consolidate, and more families moved from cities to the suburbs. Outside cities, schools got bigger and farther apart. Children living more than one or two miles away from school largely took the bus. But families who lived closer were typically expected to piece together their own transportation.
By that point, walking and biking to school had become more dangerous. Many of America’s suburbs weren’t built with sidewalks and protected spots for pedestrians to cross, and streets in cities were being revamped for cars, not people. For many families, driving started to seem like the only safe way to get to school, even though it wasn’t practical for most, Norton told me. In 1960, most families with a car had just one; in two-parent suburban households, the father typically used that car to get to work. But even if a family had a spare vehicle, there wouldn’t necessarily be someone to drive the kids, because most women did not have a driver’s license.
So throughout the ’50s and ’60s, parents—largely mothers—protested, demanding traffic signals and crossing guards so their children could safely get themselves to school. But as many of these accommodations failed to materialize, parents gradually gave up, Norton told me. By the ’80s, many households had bought a second car. By the mid-’90s, close to half of elementary and middle-school students were being driven. Many mothers became the de facto family chauffeur.
Gradually, the consequences of this shift became clear. Through the ’80s and ’90s, rising rates of childhood obesity tracked neatly with the decline of children walking and biking to school, leading some researchers to draw a connection. Car-centric schools were found to have higher levels of pollutants and greenhouse-gas emissions. And research suggested that kids driven to school might have fewer opportunities to learn their way around their neighborhood. Starting in 2005, the federal government funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into a national Safe Routes to School program to pay for the street-design changes mid-century mothers had fought for: crosswalks with street lights and wide, smooth sidewalks; speed bumps and extended curbs to help pedestrians and drivers see each other; protected bike lanes and bike racks. In 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama set a goal to encourage more children to bike or walk.
But the number of children driven to school has continued to inch upward, in large part because of distance. Suburban towns are building sprawling schools on cheap land far from where most schoolchildren live, the car line codified into their architectural design. In cities, the explosion of school-choice policies has empowered families to swap their local school for the charter across town. With so many kids now attending schools more than a mile from their home, even the most beautiful, pedestrian-friendly streets may not be enough to lure passengers to the sidewalk. A leisurely stroll to a neighborhood school has been supplanted by the smelly, alienating car line.
About a third of children still ride the school bus. But during the coronavirus pandemic especially, which spurred a nationwide shortage of drivers, bus services were slashed, and ridership fell. As more schools and families give up on using school buses, routes combine—which means many of the kids left riding live farther apart from one another and their journeys take longer, Belle Boggs, a fellow at the National Humanities Center who is working on a book about the history of school buses, told me. The bus becomes just as inconvenient as the car line.
Public transportation might seem like another option—and in some places, such as New York City, it can be. But most municipal transportation systems were designed for workers beelining downtown, not for schoolchildren commuting across the city. Plus, regardless of the route, parents, along with transit systems, rarely want young kids riding city buses or trains alone. Most guardians with the option to use a car are left glued to the driver’s seat.
But governments, schools, and communities can create new programs to fill the transportation gap. For one, cities might follow the suggestion of the transportation researchers Noreen McDonald and Annette E. Aalborg to add more pedestrian-safety infrastructure in the poorer neighborhoods that lack it, given that low-income kids still walk in large numbers. Or schools might arrange “walking school buses” or “bike buses,” in which an adult walks or bikes groups of children to school, Sam Balto, a bike-bus organizer and physical-education teacher in Portland, Oregon, told me. Only a few states use their school-transportation budget to pay for initiatives like these. But it’s easy to see how such setups could help in just about any community: For kids living farther from school, families and schools could use government funding to adapt the same idea to chaperone groups of children on public transportation.
For families that must drive, the humble carpool can offer the same convenience and safety from crime as driving on your own, while also building camaraderie and minimizing emissions. And cities can encourage it. For decades, for example, a Denver council has put together a map connecting children living near one another for carpooling. When the 2021 Marshall Fire, in Boulder County, displaced hundreds of local families, that map was a lifeline for keeping kids in school, Mia Bemelen, a council employee, told me.
Initiatives such as these don’t just get kids safely to school without overburdening parents and neighborhoods. They can also be fun. Choresh Wald, a parent in Manhattan, told me that when a large group of neighborhood families started biking to his children’s former elementary school, morning drop-off turned into a “wonderful,” joy-filled affair. Kids arrived relaxed and ready to learn. Parents chatted and even banded together to win a new protected bike lane. The school felt like a community, the car drop-off line a distant nightmare.
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