I worked in schools for almost 10 years before having my children. Unfortunately schools are no longer considered safe spaces for many children in America. My children prefer for me to drop them off at school because they feel safer than being on the bus. Dropping my children off at school also means they aren’t being exposed to inappropriate things by older students with cell phones. We could all sit here and say “when I was a kid” but this is 2025, we didn’t grow up in this current reality. Once we get some gun control, and harsher punishment for pedophiles then maybe us parents would have the mental space to handle the car line problem.
Thanks for sharing your perspective as a parent. While I disagree, I think it's important to hear from your side about why you want to drive your children. It's all about doing what is best for the kids, after all. We just have a different perspective on how to get there. Stay safe out there!
Yep, I watched this trend grow while I was working in the school market. It's ridiculous. I walked and biked to my elementary (our bike racks were FULL of bikes), middle and high school, as well as bussed (winter).
It was fun, and we enjoyed it.
Some of this is because of the simultaneous -national fear campaign about people abducting children, and also - this police state BS whereby it's considered criminal to let you kids outside unattended.
But it's also, helicopter parenting, lazy children (and their lazy children, now adult parents), and the same mobile culture that has people ordering DoorDash for garbage fast food, or Amazon, or whatever... anything for "convenience".
hell, when I was a kid, it was humiliating for your parents to walk you to your bus stop, and/or stay there until you were picked up.
Although, as an aside, a few years ago, I found a toddler, wandering around near a 50 mph road, next to some townhomes. It took me 5 minutes of knocking on doors to find his home and shitbag parents.
There's just too many parts of our culture and society, disintegrating at once, to keep track, or to fix them all in isolation.
Yes, I have seen it in my own communities. Was somewhat rare to be driven to school by a parent back in my parts of Oklahoma, but now has become more normal. Even if we didn't walk or bike, pretty much everyone rode the school bus.
That's pretty crazy about the toddler! I guess it shows you all this stuff is more generalizations. We can spot counter examples all over.
Either way, it's a shame. Riding our bikes home after school, or chatting it up on the school bus, was a lotta fun when you're just a kid, and it was also a place where you could cut loose a little, since we were under pretty tight controls at the actual schoolhouse. Today's kids, like so many things, have no idea what they are missing!
If you want kids to be independent btw, maybe change the laws. I used to take the train to school by myself when I was ten. Pretty sure a parent could be charged with neglect in many places in America for letting their ten year old go off on a 30 minute trek by themselves.
Definitely a big part of it. That mom who was arrested for letting her 10 year old boy walk into town recently just illustrates our different culture and legal expectations than when we were growing up.
1) I got kicked off the bus for graffiti in 5th grade. Got to ride my bike 2 miles to school.
2) I live in a rural suburb now. No sidewalks. The school is 25 lots away and completely un-walkable or bikable. Dear doge: please return funds to municipalities
That's tough! It sounds like your school was similar to mine in distance and space. No way would I have been allowed to bike. Not sure what my parents would have done if I got kicked off!
Former teacher here. Absolutely agree. You learn everything about the world on the school bus. It's just another example of the softening of society. Parents prepare the road for the child instead of preparing the child for the road.
School bus culture really is such a petri dish of society. Definitely had some formative years riding them to school, sort of forces mixing and interacting in ways we don't do in classes (such as age/ grade mixing).
It’s the cars! We’re far enough from the school that the kids get to ride the bus. I’ve walked home with my older one a few times, but I wouldn’t let them walk alone. There’s a major highway they have to cross, with a stoplight and crosswalk, but even the school bus drivers aren’t attentive enough to see people in that crosswalk. Their school was built in the 60’s and just last summer the city put a sidewalk along the only road to the school (in a suburban neighborhood, not remote in any way). The way my neighbors drive is too selfishly aggressive to trust them to see my minions. And the trucks these days that have a hood higher than a kid’s head are so dangerous! I hate this car centric approach.
Admittedly, it’s been 15-20 years since I would OCCASIONALLY drive one or more of our five children to school, but even back then I was mortified by what I saw. Not other children being driven to school in the first place (I’d have been quite the hypocrite to judge that as I was doing it myself), but the daily spectacle of seeing cars lining the circular driveway and children only exiting their parents’ car WHEN THEY REACHED THE CENTER OF THE DRIVE WHERE THE SIDEWALK TO THE DOOR MET THE SIDEWALK OF THE CIRCLE.
Once - maybe twice - my kids tried to pull that with me. I wasn’t having it. Once we got into the circle, at any part where there was a sidewalk to step out onto: “Get out!”
I am glad you mentioned the hysteria over abductions as a driving factor for the phenomenon of school pickup lines. The data is clear that it is nowhere near the problem that the news and social media make it out to be. For a lack of a better term, abduction is romanticized in American society. The image of an innocent child being snatched up in an instance by an evildoer for insidious purposes is implanted in our minds, yet in actual crime statistics, this is an exceedingly rare occurrence. There's an entire corner of the internet dedicated to uncovering new "methods" people use to kidnap children and women, perpetuating this culture of fear.
Part of the solution to this problem will have to be convincing parents it's safe to let their kids get to school without being driven there, whether by bus, bike, or on foot. I'm worried that this fear will outweigh any attempts to reorganize cities to make the journey to school more feasible on foot, by bike, or with public transit unless it is directly addressed.
Yes, it goes into the idea of "if it bleeds, it leads" in media, that has only been exacerbated by social media and the internet. I don't actually have a good answer, other than trying to bring more attention to the issue. It does make support for public transit, walking, etc more difficult. So it's an up hill battle.
When my kids were in K-12, we lived in suburban San Francisco. No sidewalks in our town, particularly in the hills, no school bus service, and no public transit. So we had to drive them to school in the morning before I went to work and arrange for sitters in the afternoons to pick them up at 3:00 p.m. I used to joke (but not really) that our school district was keeping women at home, especially when you also considered the vast amount of volunteerism the school district required. There were no teachers’ aides, no secretaries except for the one assigned to the Principal, and no drivers for class field trips.
Our schools run on the unpaid labor of women. If you totaled up the volunteer man-hours our schools receive and actually assigned a wage to them, the ACTUAL cost of an education would be far higher than what we believe it to be now. I would love to see all the moms who drive and volunteer their time to literally go on strike for a month. The whole system would grind to a halt and maybe, just maybe, we could get the funding we need to run public education effectively. But who am I kidding? Women’s time is not valuable in this society.
This is actually an interesting angle. It forces a parent to basically work part-time, and that often falls on women. It's ironic because we have higher rates of women in the work force than in the 1960s, yet there is now this added burden of getting kids to school (not just on the bus or out the door). Tough for moms.
They have bike lanes in both New York and Chicago. My son grew up in Brooklyn and walked to public grade school. He took public transit to middle school and high school. He attended Music and Art High School in Manhattan. When I came to Chicago I got a student pass for public transit as well because I was attending art school. City kids tend to use public transit because streets are too crowded to drive. School buses are used here in Chicago, too. What I see most often here in Chicago is parents walking their kids to school.
Places like Chicago and NYC are such outliers in terms of public transport. I bet their students make up the bulk of the % of American students who take public transit to school. It does give an entirely different perspective on life to have to grow up in that kind of environment.
Wow. No kids here and I thought these long pickup lines were only for wealthy charter and private schools - basically places where there is often a surplus of sahp. Insane! I cannot imagine doing this. I want my kid to ride the bus! How have we destroyed even such a basic and seemingly non-controversial public service. Truly mind boggling.
Charter schools definitely a part of it. So that will have to be the future article. I agree, the bus is a great socialization space. Wish we weren't losing that.
"This issue is related to cost-saving budgeting in K-12 education."
I hear this all the time but the school district in my city has more funding now than ever. The student population has actually DECREASED and yet we're paying higher taxes. My kids go to charter school so we have to drive them. But for the parents I know who's kids go to regular public school, the bus system is an utter wreck.
I honestly don't know what the cause of the problem is, nor the solution. It's one of those things where: no one likes it as it is, everyone agrees that they wish it were different, but they can't seem to figure it out. It's like there's a competency gap in this country.
It is true that we actually do budget quite a bit for schools. But often the budgets are for specific things and services, so it's not just a big pot of money they can move wherever. Transport has been the first thing to get cut when questions arise about how money is spent. It is definitely worth a deeper look into those rationales though. I also think the school choice movement, as you mentioned in your own experience, plays into this. I am already working on a future article to consider that. Thanks for reading.
As a culture we've become much less tolerant of bullying. The stuff that was considered business as usual on bus rides in the 90's would not be tolerated by many parents today. I know more than one mother who started driving her children after the school failed to stop bullying on the bus.
State mandates make many small local schools increasingly non viable. My state already subsidizes rural schools so they can have a legally mandated nurse on site.
If a school is required under IDEA to provide a speech therapist or a school counselor or a low vision specialist for disabled children, they also need enough children with those disabilities in one school to keep those professionals busy.
And by the way those disabled kids have a right to be in a classroom with typically developing peers most of the day, so simply creating a county wide sped school isn't an option either. So you build fewer, bigger schools.
Thanks for the disabilities perspective here. We definitely outline these debates in my classes when we talk about the issue. But hadn't really thought of it in terms of impacting the school car pickup line. I guess everything is connected!
Also I think it's interesting that you don't consider school buses public transport. It's literally mass transportation provided at public expense. it is by far the largest mass transit system in the country, even today.
And historically it has worked because children all need to go to/from a single destination at the same time and their time was less valuable than adults'. Things like extracurriculars make this less true today.
Just to clarify, I used the data and categories from the US federal government. So I didn't create them on my own. That being said, it does make sense to separate school bus and other public transit, like subway or public buses. In the latter case, students may be on with non-students and they are operating for the city/ area broadly rather than school focus. Gives us a good data point.
As an exchange student I thought it was puzzling that most kids lived a mile away from school, but still drove there. But it was a part of socializing and being free and independent.
Not really! It's become a car culture, but that was through some major political intervention. And even within a car culture, there can and should be space for walking or biking. Part of car culture takes away that independence actually. My previous article: https://www.ft.com/content/27169841-7ee3-481e-919d-41b247e401f6
I worked in schools for almost 10 years before having my children. Unfortunately schools are no longer considered safe spaces for many children in America. My children prefer for me to drop them off at school because they feel safer than being on the bus. Dropping my children off at school also means they aren’t being exposed to inappropriate things by older students with cell phones. We could all sit here and say “when I was a kid” but this is 2025, we didn’t grow up in this current reality. Once we get some gun control, and harsher punishment for pedophiles then maybe us parents would have the mental space to handle the car line problem.
Thanks for sharing your perspective as a parent. While I disagree, I think it's important to hear from your side about why you want to drive your children. It's all about doing what is best for the kids, after all. We just have a different perspective on how to get there. Stay safe out there!
Yep, I watched this trend grow while I was working in the school market. It's ridiculous. I walked and biked to my elementary (our bike racks were FULL of bikes), middle and high school, as well as bussed (winter).
It was fun, and we enjoyed it.
Some of this is because of the simultaneous -national fear campaign about people abducting children, and also - this police state BS whereby it's considered criminal to let you kids outside unattended.
But it's also, helicopter parenting, lazy children (and their lazy children, now adult parents), and the same mobile culture that has people ordering DoorDash for garbage fast food, or Amazon, or whatever... anything for "convenience".
hell, when I was a kid, it was humiliating for your parents to walk you to your bus stop, and/or stay there until you were picked up.
Although, as an aside, a few years ago, I found a toddler, wandering around near a 50 mph road, next to some townhomes. It took me 5 minutes of knocking on doors to find his home and shitbag parents.
There's just too many parts of our culture and society, disintegrating at once, to keep track, or to fix them all in isolation.
Yes, I have seen it in my own communities. Was somewhat rare to be driven to school by a parent back in my parts of Oklahoma, but now has become more normal. Even if we didn't walk or bike, pretty much everyone rode the school bus.
That's pretty crazy about the toddler! I guess it shows you all this stuff is more generalizations. We can spot counter examples all over.
Either way, it's a shame. Riding our bikes home after school, or chatting it up on the school bus, was a lotta fun when you're just a kid, and it was also a place where you could cut loose a little, since we were under pretty tight controls at the actual schoolhouse. Today's kids, like so many things, have no idea what they are missing!
If you want kids to be independent btw, maybe change the laws. I used to take the train to school by myself when I was ten. Pretty sure a parent could be charged with neglect in many places in America for letting their ten year old go off on a 30 minute trek by themselves.
Stop helicopter parenting.
Definitely a big part of it. That mom who was arrested for letting her 10 year old boy walk into town recently just illustrates our different culture and legal expectations than when we were growing up.
1) I got kicked off the bus for graffiti in 5th grade. Got to ride my bike 2 miles to school.
2) I live in a rural suburb now. No sidewalks. The school is 25 lots away and completely un-walkable or bikable. Dear doge: please return funds to municipalities
That's tough! It sounds like your school was similar to mine in distance and space. No way would I have been allowed to bike. Not sure what my parents would have done if I got kicked off!
Former teacher here. Absolutely agree. You learn everything about the world on the school bus. It's just another example of the softening of society. Parents prepare the road for the child instead of preparing the child for the road.
School bus culture really is such a petri dish of society. Definitely had some formative years riding them to school, sort of forces mixing and interacting in ways we don't do in classes (such as age/ grade mixing).
It’s the cars! We’re far enough from the school that the kids get to ride the bus. I’ve walked home with my older one a few times, but I wouldn’t let them walk alone. There’s a major highway they have to cross, with a stoplight and crosswalk, but even the school bus drivers aren’t attentive enough to see people in that crosswalk. Their school was built in the 60’s and just last summer the city put a sidewalk along the only road to the school (in a suburban neighborhood, not remote in any way). The way my neighbors drive is too selfishly aggressive to trust them to see my minions. And the trucks these days that have a hood higher than a kid’s head are so dangerous! I hate this car centric approach.
Crazy it took that long for sidewalks! My home town school STILL doesn't have any, so no one walks or bikes at all. It's a shame.
And a major security issue
Insanity! Who spends hours annually in a pickup line?!
Frustrated parents!
Admittedly, it’s been 15-20 years since I would OCCASIONALLY drive one or more of our five children to school, but even back then I was mortified by what I saw. Not other children being driven to school in the first place (I’d have been quite the hypocrite to judge that as I was doing it myself), but the daily spectacle of seeing cars lining the circular driveway and children only exiting their parents’ car WHEN THEY REACHED THE CENTER OF THE DRIVE WHERE THE SIDEWALK TO THE DOOR MET THE SIDEWALK OF THE CIRCLE.
Once - maybe twice - my kids tried to pull that with me. I wasn’t having it. Once we got into the circle, at any part where there was a sidewalk to step out onto: “Get out!”
And they did. 🙂
I think in occasion this would be fine. When it becomes the norm to do every day, that's when we find ourselves in the problem we are in.
I am glad you mentioned the hysteria over abductions as a driving factor for the phenomenon of school pickup lines. The data is clear that it is nowhere near the problem that the news and social media make it out to be. For a lack of a better term, abduction is romanticized in American society. The image of an innocent child being snatched up in an instance by an evildoer for insidious purposes is implanted in our minds, yet in actual crime statistics, this is an exceedingly rare occurrence. There's an entire corner of the internet dedicated to uncovering new "methods" people use to kidnap children and women, perpetuating this culture of fear.
Part of the solution to this problem will have to be convincing parents it's safe to let their kids get to school without being driven there, whether by bus, bike, or on foot. I'm worried that this fear will outweigh any attempts to reorganize cities to make the journey to school more feasible on foot, by bike, or with public transit unless it is directly addressed.
Yes, it goes into the idea of "if it bleeds, it leads" in media, that has only been exacerbated by social media and the internet. I don't actually have a good answer, other than trying to bring more attention to the issue. It does make support for public transit, walking, etc more difficult. So it's an up hill battle.
When my kids were in K-12, we lived in suburban San Francisco. No sidewalks in our town, particularly in the hills, no school bus service, and no public transit. So we had to drive them to school in the morning before I went to work and arrange for sitters in the afternoons to pick them up at 3:00 p.m. I used to joke (but not really) that our school district was keeping women at home, especially when you also considered the vast amount of volunteerism the school district required. There were no teachers’ aides, no secretaries except for the one assigned to the Principal, and no drivers for class field trips.
Our schools run on the unpaid labor of women. If you totaled up the volunteer man-hours our schools receive and actually assigned a wage to them, the ACTUAL cost of an education would be far higher than what we believe it to be now. I would love to see all the moms who drive and volunteer their time to literally go on strike for a month. The whole system would grind to a halt and maybe, just maybe, we could get the funding we need to run public education effectively. But who am I kidding? Women’s time is not valuable in this society.
This is actually an interesting angle. It forces a parent to basically work part-time, and that often falls on women. It's ironic because we have higher rates of women in the work force than in the 1960s, yet there is now this added burden of getting kids to school (not just on the bus or out the door). Tough for moms.
They have bike lanes in both New York and Chicago. My son grew up in Brooklyn and walked to public grade school. He took public transit to middle school and high school. He attended Music and Art High School in Manhattan. When I came to Chicago I got a student pass for public transit as well because I was attending art school. City kids tend to use public transit because streets are too crowded to drive. School buses are used here in Chicago, too. What I see most often here in Chicago is parents walking their kids to school.
Places like Chicago and NYC are such outliers in terms of public transport. I bet their students make up the bulk of the % of American students who take public transit to school. It does give an entirely different perspective on life to have to grow up in that kind of environment.
Wow. No kids here and I thought these long pickup lines were only for wealthy charter and private schools - basically places where there is often a surplus of sahp. Insane! I cannot imagine doing this. I want my kid to ride the bus! How have we destroyed even such a basic and seemingly non-controversial public service. Truly mind boggling.
Charter schools definitely a part of it. So that will have to be the future article. I agree, the bus is a great socialization space. Wish we weren't losing that.
"This issue is related to cost-saving budgeting in K-12 education."
I hear this all the time but the school district in my city has more funding now than ever. The student population has actually DECREASED and yet we're paying higher taxes. My kids go to charter school so we have to drive them. But for the parents I know who's kids go to regular public school, the bus system is an utter wreck.
I honestly don't know what the cause of the problem is, nor the solution. It's one of those things where: no one likes it as it is, everyone agrees that they wish it were different, but they can't seem to figure it out. It's like there's a competency gap in this country.
It is true that we actually do budget quite a bit for schools. But often the budgets are for specific things and services, so it's not just a big pot of money they can move wherever. Transport has been the first thing to get cut when questions arise about how money is spent. It is definitely worth a deeper look into those rationales though. I also think the school choice movement, as you mentioned in your own experience, plays into this. I am already working on a future article to consider that. Thanks for reading.
As a culture we've become much less tolerant of bullying. The stuff that was considered business as usual on bus rides in the 90's would not be tolerated by many parents today. I know more than one mother who started driving her children after the school failed to stop bullying on the bus.
State mandates make many small local schools increasingly non viable. My state already subsidizes rural schools so they can have a legally mandated nurse on site.
If a school is required under IDEA to provide a speech therapist or a school counselor or a low vision specialist for disabled children, they also need enough children with those disabilities in one school to keep those professionals busy.
And by the way those disabled kids have a right to be in a classroom with typically developing peers most of the day, so simply creating a county wide sped school isn't an option either. So you build fewer, bigger schools.
Thanks for the disabilities perspective here. We definitely outline these debates in my classes when we talk about the issue. But hadn't really thought of it in terms of impacting the school car pickup line. I guess everything is connected!
Also I think it's interesting that you don't consider school buses public transport. It's literally mass transportation provided at public expense. it is by far the largest mass transit system in the country, even today.
And historically it has worked because children all need to go to/from a single destination at the same time and their time was less valuable than adults'. Things like extracurriculars make this less true today.
Just to clarify, I used the data and categories from the US federal government. So I didn't create them on my own. That being said, it does make sense to separate school bus and other public transit, like subway or public buses. In the latter case, students may be on with non-students and they are operating for the city/ area broadly rather than school focus. Gives us a good data point.
Meh… America is a car culture.
As an exchange student I thought it was puzzling that most kids lived a mile away from school, but still drove there. But it was a part of socializing and being free and independent.
Not really! It's become a car culture, but that was through some major political intervention. And even within a car culture, there can and should be space for walking or biking. Part of car culture takes away that independence actually. My previous article: https://www.ft.com/content/27169841-7ee3-481e-919d-41b247e401f6