Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuckerman
One pet peeve of mine: school buses. When living in Germany, in a mid-sized city, I was astonished to see that school kids of all grades either walked to school or, in the case of higher grades, took public transit (buses, streetcars, etc) to and from school. Their ticket fees were paid by the state. There was no separate bus system for schools. The result: at an early age, and across the economic spectrum of families, these youngsters learned to use public transit on a regular basis. In addition they were integrated into the general transit using community. In my view, this early experience led to children growing up believing that public transit was for all people and a perfectly normal thing to use in getting around. In addition, there were no extra buses clogging the streets and impeding the regular flow of traffic.
School budgets and costs were dedicated to educational needs. Also the children were on well-maintained vehicles driven by experienced individuals.
|
Is the built environment as suburban as the way most of our cities are built? I know kids in cities like New York and Chicago able to use public transportation because how integrated schools are in the urban fabric. Your typical school in the suburbs is this huge factory-like building set far back from the road, and the kids live in subdivisions full of cul-de-sacs, which make it difficult to create bus routes.
Interestingly, the only kids in Atlanta I know who have an organized use of Marta are students K-12 commuting from Buckhead and northern burbs to the private school, Woodward Academy, in College Park. The school has its own bus fleet, but some students ride the train together. There's a shuttle from the College Park station that then picks up the kids to take them to campus.