I live right up the street from a public elementary school. This was part of the reason we bought this house, if a minor one; I mean, who knows if we’ll even still be living here in five years when Junho is ready for kindergarten. But it’s a lovely little school by the woods that’s a ten-minute walk from our home, and thinking about walking him to school in the mornings fills me with what the kids use to call “the feels.” Crunching through leaves on a New England fall morning, delivering my little guy to school as he bops along beside me…. I drive by and see the sweet little multiracial student body doing silly kid stuff on the playground and I try to imagine him that age. Can’t do it! But I look forward all the same.

But - I try not to drive by at all during dropoff and pickup times. Because like so many other American elementary schools, the one up the street has developed a problem, a geometry problem, one driven by irrationality and fear. Cars choke the street, stressed crossing guards do what they can, cops are assigned every single day, and what was once a generally simple and stress-free process has become a constant nightmare for parents, students, staff, and local residents. Yes, twice a day, my immediate neighborhood is consumed by the school car pickup line problem, which has become more and more common in this country, and for the dumbest reasons you can think of.

You see, elementary schools have been plotted and designed with the assumption that a significant portion of the kids are going to arrive by bus or walk. They have infrastructure to accommodate parents arriving in cars, but the space for such infrastructure is limited, and the entire school bus system exists because bringing kids by bus is more rational than doing so with a fleet of individual family cars - and for decades, schools were able to rely on parents to help them be rational in this way. The preference for bus transportation is simply an expression of the same basic issues of geometry and movement that urbanists have been stressing for decades: when you need to bring a lot of people to or from one place, having them arrive individually or in very small groups in passenger cars is the least efficient, least sensible way to go about it. You’ve no doubt seen images like the above before, and they’re a very elegant distillation of the point: the vehicle-size-to-passenger ratio of individual cars is just awful compared to a bus.

Setting the Bar

Why Car Lines Shouldn't Exist

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3 years ago · 9 likes · 6 comments · Shane Trotter

This piece from Shane Trotter is an excellent overview of the whole problem, and I really encourage you to read the whole thing. As Trotter writes, “The car line is a truly soul-sucking way to begin and end your day. It encompasses much of what is wrong in the modern youth development paradigm. AND it is a norm that can and should go extinct as soon as humanly possible.”

I cannot stress enough how fundamentally irrational it is to chauffer your children to school every day, out of safety concerns; that reasoning requires just a wild misreading of the underlying danger. The child fatality rate for school buses is 0.2 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT), while the rate for passenger cars is 1.5 fatalities per 100 million VMT. This means students are nearly eight times more likely to die in a passenger car than in a school bus per mile driven. You may recall some particularly disturbing stories of school bus accidents, but you recall them precisely because they’re so rare. Meanwhile, fatal car accidents are so common that they sometimes aren’t even covered in the local media. Many people will respond that they don’t have to worry because they’re good drivers, unlike most people, but notoriously everyone thinks of themselves as an above average driver. School buses have design features like large crumple zones and high-backed energy-absorbing seats, their size and weight allow them to absorb crash forces better than smaller vehicles, and their high visibility also reduces the risk of accidents in the first place. School bus drivers are also trained to emphasize safety above any other consideration.

Meanwhile, walking is safe as houses, and the tragic exceptions are themselves the result of cars being unsafe; if it weren’t for children having to walk along roads or across roads, the fatality rate for children walking to school would be damned near zero. Of course, the fear for many parents is that someone is going to jump out of a van and snatch their kid. But this fear is also fundamentally irrational. As I wrote for Persuasion earlier this year, kidnapping as traditionally understood - the stranger jumping out of the bushes to abscond with your child - is just incredibly rare. The headline numbers appear large, but the absolutely overwhelming majority of kidnappings in the United States are committed by a family member as part of some sort of custody dispute or similar. Conventional estimates are that something on the order of 100 to 200 kidnappings a year are of the feared “stranger snatching your kid” variety; there are 70 million children in this country. Also, like all crimes, these cases are influenced by social class. If your family is middle class or above, the risk of your child being snatched off the street are far lower than the risk of them being killed by bees or by a dog. And if you’re inclined to say that children today are safe because of fearful overparenting, I’m afraid the evidence just doesn’t support your position. Random child abduction has always been remarkably rare. It’s just not a realistic fear.

But whether we’re replacing walking or the bus with driving, the real point is that cars are just remarkably unsafe. Indeed, I have to underline this point: when your kid is riding in your car, it’s the single most dangerous scenario they regularly enter into. “I want my kid to be safe so I’m going to be putting them in the car a couple extra times a day” is the height of irrationality. It’s indefensible. Unfortunately, every successive generation seems to fall deeper and deeper into the clutches of irrational fear. I mean, if you think Gen Z is unhealthily addicted to safety and habituated to fear when it comes to their own lives, can you imagine how they’re going to parent?

Americans have never been more devoted to the god of safety than they are now; that this is happening at precisely the time when American children have never been safer or healthier is just one of those particularly unfortunate ironies. You can sometimes get people to acknowledge that crime is down, that child mortality is down, that child health and safety (however you want to quantify them) are up. Yet parental intuition, shaped by a culture that perceives danger everywhere except in its own reflexive habits, says otherwise. This is an expression of safetyism, our country’s peculiar civic religion. We treat fear as virtue and vigilance as patriotism. To be afraid is to be responsible; to be constantly alert to potential harm is to be a good American. We worry about kidnapped children, lurking predators, bullying on the bus, “bad influences,” inclement weather, or simply the specter of the Great Unknown. That we exempt the most dangerous machines in the lives of most people, their cars, is just another reminder that irrationality and fear go hand in glove. Whatever the reasoning, car-addicted parents believe they’re mitigating risk when in fact they’re escalating it.

Safetyism thrives on a false sense of control. Driving your kid isn’t safer but feels safer because you are behind the wheel, you are monitoring the environment, you are acting. Sending a child off unsupervised, whether onto a bus or onto a sidewalk, feels like relinquishing agency. But of course the factors that govern risk don’t care about feelings. Your own subjectively-soothing sense of control has no bearing on the objective statistical reality that passenger cars are responsible for the vast majority of child transportation deaths each year. (And the biggest killer of children overall, firearms deaths, are overwhelmingly not caused by random violence committed by strangers.) Even if you do happen to be an above-average driver, the basic reality of driving is that your safety is always subject to the influence of forces you can’t predict or control. But it’s all vibes, at the end of the day, isn’t it?

This bone-deep cultural addiction to irrationality isn’t an annoying quirk but a societal crisis with societal consequences. The more parents who overparent and treat their children as incredibly delicate creatures who have to be hidden away from the world, the more that becomes a social expectation that everyone else has to labor under. The more that fearful parenting becomes the norm, the more that legal structures bend to punish parents who push for a heathy sense of risk and freedom for their own children. Meanwhile, school drop-off zones have become congested, anxiety-soaked battlegrounds that are ironically far more dangerous than the bus stop down the street. Like I said, I avoid driving near the elementary school at dropoff or pickup time like the plague because the street is absolutely choked with cars, stressy parents circling, leaning on their horns, burning precious hours of their lives - and often, doing so because they’re afraid that if they don’t, they’ll look like bad parents.

As Rebecca Onion wrote a decade ago

That middle-class childhood has become, in actuality, more and more safe, while parents are more and more anxious about danger is the central paradox of early twenty-first-century American parental attitudes about child safety. This is a knotty intellectual problem with a lot of real-world significance; people’s beliefs about their children’s safety influence the way schools are funded and communities are planned, as well as the way parents relate to political life. As Eula Biss wrote last year in her book, On Immunity, “What has been done to us seems to be, among other things, that we have been made fearful. What will we do with our fear? This strikes me as a central question of both citizenship and motherhood.”

At the heart of all this is an American identity forged around the idea that danger is omnipresent and must be fought with constant vigilance and personal sacrifice. Safety becomes less about actual outcomes and more about performing the role of the good, ever-concerned parent. But when emotion and optics take precedence over evidence, we create exactly the harms we claim to be preventing. Luxuriating in fear that way feels responsible; the reality is anything but.