[mostlylurks]

Cold weather and darkness are not obstacles. Here in Finland the winters are darker, colder, and longer than in the vast majority of the US, yet even elementary schoolers usually go to school by themselves, often by foot or on a bike, sometimes by taking a bus or a train.

The problem that the US faces with respect to this issue is primarily caused the design of american cities (including the surrounding suburbs), which are laid out in a manner that makes the use of a car a practical necessity for getting anywhere. You wouldn't have to worry about a 20-mile country road to school out of a suburb if you instead made the sensible choice of placing services (like schools) right where they are needed, as european cities tend to do, instead of 20 miles away.

[scottLobster]

You'd be surprised. Note that Sioux Falls, the capital of South Dakota, has substantially lower average lows in Winter than Helsinki.

https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/finland/helsinki/climate https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/sioux-falls/climate

Yes our car-dependent infrastructure is an issue, but it's infrastructure we've built up for the better part of a century. Changing it will be slow and gradual, and in the meantime cold weather and darkness are issues in much of the country. Also hot weather in other parts of the country (heat stroke can be a serious concern in the Southwest)

[herbstein]

Helsinki is one of the Southern-most cities of Finland situated on the edge of a large body of water. Instead, take a look at this Not Just Bikes video covering biking in Finland during winter: https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU

The weather in Oulu during winter looks a lot like the weather in Sioux Falls, except there's a lot more precipitation (snow) in Oulu.

[3maj]

Laughs in Northern Canadian

[barrkel]

The video linked in the post you're replying to is by a Canadian and compares Oulu with Canadian policies.

[jds_]

Pierre is the capital of South Dakota - though Sioux Falls is the largest city.

One statistic I've read for eastern South Dakota is that it's one of the worst states to live if you hate extreme cold and extreme heat as we have both - sometimes within a week of each other!

[tmmx]

Sioux Falls is the biggest city in South Dakota, not the capital city. The capital city is Pierre, SD.

[scottLobster]

Doh! Yeah that was a brain fart...

[b112]

Some of what you say in your second part makes sense, although it has absolutely no bearing, nor is it a counter argument to the post you are replying to. It certainly doesn't refute the parent poster's statements about now, today, right now, instead, at best, maybe over 30 years, change could slowly be enacted.

However, as a Canadian, some of what you say is just plain gibberish. My rural county, not province or country, but county, is on its own larger than some European countries, with a population of 20,000.

If you tried to put schools within even 10 miles of every kid, you'd end up with hundreds of one room schools, with a teacher teaching 4 kids.

The problem here is, there is no one size fits all. Trying to make suggestions needs to be more location specific.

Because when someone starts talking about rural living in the US and Canada, Finnish experience has no parallel.

I mean, come on, I've seen farms, just a single farm owned by one man in rural Manitobia, larger than massive cities!

Millions of acres of land, with just wheat and rye on it! Owned by a dude, presumably larger than some countries!

[mostlylurks]

My comment was not an attempt to refute the entirety of what the parent comment stated (since I agree with most of it), merely a response to a tangential aspect of it.

I am quite aware that what I mentioned is not feasible for some of the more rural regions that exist in the US and Canada. However, those constitute a rather small portion of the population. It is as you say; there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but certain solutions are so widely applicable that they could bring significant benefit to the lives of most americans and are thus worth pursuing (where relevant) even if they do not solve the challenges faced by the small number of people living in the more rural regions of these countries.

[thematrixturtle]

> Because when someone starts talking about rural living in the US and Canada, Finnish experience has no parallel.

The Finnish municipality of Inari is over 17,000 sq.km, in the same ballpark as the entire country of Israel, with a population of 7,000. This gives it a density of 0.47 people/km2, four times less than Manitoba.

[bombcar]

Average population density can be misleading, especially if all 7,000 of those people basically live in one town.

[thematrixturtle]

They don't. But for what it's worth, basically all Manitobans live in Winnipeg.

[HWR_14]

No, the problem isn't suburbs. Those are densely packed enough that a bus picks kids up. It's rural areas that don't have mass transport, which makes sense.

[Ar-Curunir]

Suburbs are not densely packed. Picking up kids in a school bus would require over an hour, even in the small suburb that I live in. Rather, everybody either drives to school or is dropped off there: the parking lot of the high school is the same square footage as the school itself (excluding the football field).

[HWR_14]

Then you probably either (a) really live a rural area/exurb or (b) don't understand that they can operate more than one bus or (c) live in one of the areas that has had local government intentionally killing off bus service.

As to the local high school parking lot, that's not an "efficiency" thing - it's a "young people getting a taste of freedom" thing.

[Ar-Curunir]

I live in a Bay Area suburb that is decidedly not rural.

Also, how is "doubling the school's area and vastly increasing environmental damage" not an efficiency thing? Kids the world over get by without having to rely on cars to experience freedom. If your society requires people to drive multi-thousand dollar pollution machines to experience freedom, then it's not truly free.

[RHSeeger]

> the vast majority of the US

It's worth noting that <hotter | colder> than the vast majority of the US isn't a particularly useful metric.

- The people that say their kids can't walk to school because of the winter weather could be in an area where it's constantly below freezing and it's common to have over a foot of snow on the ground most of the time (ie, there is ONLY the road to walk on, and it's unsafe because of the snow). - The people that say their kids can't walk to school because of the heat could be in an area where 110degree weather is common (somewhat less of an issue since most school doesn't happen in the hottest months; but there is summer school). - There are plenty of places in the US where the houses are so far apart that its not realistic to have a school that even moderately close to more than a couple of them.

Even if "most of the US" is more temperate than "some location where kids walk to school", there's still plenty of places where its considerably less reasonable to walk to school year round.

[yencabulator]

> ie, there is ONLY the road to walk on, and it's unsafe because of the snow

As a Finn, the first part is an infrastructure issue and you're building it wrong, and the second part is just plain old weird; snow on the ground doesn't make walking unsafe. Too much snow makes walking slower and more tiring, but that circles back to infrastructure, specifically snow plowing.

[RHSeeger]

Solving the infrastructure problem is extremely costly. Sure it can be done, but that means someone else doesn't get done. You have to pick your battles.

And walking on the road when the road has snow on it (so is slippery) IS dangerous if there's any amount of traffic. Even if you can stay to the side of the road (which is hard when there's a lot of snow), the risk of being hit is increased because cars can lose fine control under such conditions.

[yencabulator]

It's not the snow that is dangerous, it's the cars.

Americans don't like to admit certain things, and this is one of those. You shift blame from how your roads are built to things like weather.

From the grandparent:

> Cold weather and darkness are not obstacles.

They really are not the obstacles, so I'd ask you to not use them as excuses.

[RHSeeger]

The roads are already built, and the towns are already laid out in ways that require cars. Arguing that the roads, towns, and cars could be changed so that walking to school is reasonable... while technically true, is not particularly useful in anything but the very long term. There isn't the money to do that.

So yes, because of the way the roads, towns, and cars exist today, it is not reasonable to have kids walk to school in many cases. The weather conditions for the area are one of the things that go into that calculation; they are one of the obstacles that add up to it not being realistic. Are they the root cause? No. But it's irrelevant, because they _are_ one of the factors involved in outcome. If the weather was always perfect, then those children could walk to school year round. If dedicated walking paths were created that cars could not travel on were created, then those children could walk to school year round. Neither one of those is going to happen.

> It's not the snow that is dangerous, it's the cars.

Pretending it's realistic to magic all the car focused town layouts away is completely and utterly unrealistic, so I'd ask you to not pretend that "if we just admitted cars were the problem, all the problems would go away".

[yencabulator]

The process isn't quick, but I don't think anyone has claimed it to be.

Meanwhile, this subthread started at

> Heat, cold, darkness, lack of infrastructure, and distance.

If you don't think poor civic planning is at fault, you'll never fix it.

[stale2002]

Ok, maybe it is partly caused by the design of cities.

We aren't going to completely redesign all of America's cities for the purpose of making sure teens get a bit more sleep though, so the point is irrelevant.

[mostlylurks]

>completely redesign

That is quite the hyperbole.

>for the purpose of making sure teens get a bit more sleep

Add to that the time and resources wasted by millions of parents daily driving around instead of doing something economically productive, something that keeps them healthier, or just anything that doesn't cause environmental damage. And the fact that this is just one small instance of a much bigger issue affecting most people (anyone regularly commuting or using services within or near cities) to some degree. It's obviously not the most important issue out there right now, but it is a whole lot of wasted time and effort that could be eliminated, and you could probably even do it gradually without implementing any sudden sweeping changes.

[stale2002]

> That is quite the hyperbole.

It is really not. The topic is a legal change in california to change when school starts.

And to respond to this fairly minor topic by suggesting that cities be rebuilt is absurd.

I am going to say that there are more immediate solutions to kids getting enough sleep, due to school starting times, than "Well just redesign all our cities to be more like europe!"

[drewcoo]

Actually, there's even a name for that kind of hyperbolic misrepresentation of what someone else was saying so you can pretend their argument wasn't even valid.

[stale2002]

Suggesting that cities aren't designed correctly is obviously implying that the solution is to redesign cities.

Redesigning entire cities is hard. It is not a reasonable thing to bring up, when talking about a policy regarding when school starts.

That is not hyperbole. Instead it is completely legitimate to dismiss someone suggesting that cities are designed poorly, because to fix such a problem would be a huge undertaking.

[asveikau]

I agree with the "redesign all cities" goal, even as hyperbolically stated.

The health benefits far exceed just sleep.

But I think it would take more than 100 years to change this, and most importantly, many in the US are not interested in such a change whatsoever.

[DocTomoe]

No need for a complete redesign. Further up, it was suggested to put the schools near to where the students are - in the suburbs. That's a common sense policy Europe does naturally, and which everyone who spent some time playing SimCity (or the likes) understands.

No need to nuke LA and rebuild, just take a few plots in the middle and put a school in there.

[RHSeeger]

This seems to not take into account the size of towns. For example, the one I live in is ~23.5 sq miles. If you put the schools in the center, you're looking at approximately a 2.5 mile walk each way for the children on the outskirts (the town isn't perfectly round, but close enough). And even that is assuming there's a direct "as the crow flies" path; which there certainly isn't.

At the very least, for most towns, you're looking at moving a bunch of roads around. For many of them, you'd need to add more schools to keep the distances reasonable. I expect, for a large number of the town, the term "complete redesign" is a reasonable description.

[DocTomoe]

Hm, 2.5 miles are 4 kilometers - perfectly walk- and bikeable. Any teenager easily can do that, over here, they would. I do not see the issue, especially since it will not hit everyone.

Alternatively, and this may be a radical idea: If your town is five kilometers across, with a uniform distribution of population: Why not have two, or three smaller schools, evenly distributed? A similar-sized German city (taking Öhringen, ~25.000 citizens, which also follows the 'almost a circle' rule, as an example here) has six highschools (which also take in students from neighboring villages)...

[RHSeeger]

> Why not have two, or three smaller schools, evenly distributed?

Money. A lot of it would be required.

[DocTomoe]

I'd argue: money well spend. Also, smaller schools usually perform better when it comes to student success.