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.
>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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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.