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School run: Cutting car use will take much more than educating children and parents:
As the summer holidays come to an end and children return to school following lockdown, there couldn't be a better time for us to consider the school commute. Nowadays, many children in the UK commute to school by car. But getting more parents to ditch the car for school journeys and switch to more active modes of travel, such as walking or cycling, is of great public health importance.
[...] As cities have expanded under suburban sprawl, commuting distances to school have increased. They are longer now than they have ever been before. This is another reason more children travel to school by car now than they used to. Less than half of all children in England attend their most local school.
An education policy that lets parents choose their child's school compounds the issue of suburban sprawl. Those parents that are able to exercise choice do so, and in some cases travel great distances so that their child attends the best-performing school. Once school choice has been decided, so too has children's mode of travel to school. Longer school commutes equals more car travel.
[...] Tackling the real causes of car dependency on the school commute would benefit children, society and the environment. It would solve several public health challenges.
If all children attended their local school, fewer children would travel by car, and because of this, fewer children would be injured on the roads. There would be less noise pollution and less air pollution, which would reduce children's risk of developing respiratory conditions. We would see more people speaking to each other on our streets because of the increase in footfall, and there would be an improved sense of safety because there would be more "eyes on the street."
Will eliminating school choice for children make them healthier?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28 2020, @04:52PM (3 children)
Going through the mortgage application and title transfer process, by the time I was in my first house ($80K) it certainly felt like I "won" it from the boss monster in the dungeon.
I suppose there are parts of the country where $800K is a "starter house" now... I was never tempted to move there - I was offered a job in L.A. when my $80K Miami house would have cost $240K for a not-as-nice equivalent home near the L.A. job. I believe my Miami salary was ~50K at the time, and the L.A. employer was certainly not offering a raise to $150K, or even $100K - maybe $55K.
As I understand things, where an engineer might earn $80K around these parts, the same engineer doing more or less the same work in Silicon Valley should be expecting net annual compensation >$400K around there. I sincerely hope the COVID-19 acts as some kind of leveling force for that. 2-3x differences in compensation for identical skills by location make some sense, 5x-15x? not so much.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday August 29 2020, @03:06AM (2 children)
I'm actually on the west coast of Canada, just outside the Greater Vancouver area. It's one of the most expensive areas in the world for housing and just keeps going up with plateaus occasionally when the economy crashes. I really don't know how most people afford housing.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 29 2020, @01:42PM (1 child)
Well, all the origin stories are different, but our friends who bought real-estate in your area did it this way:
Move from England to Miami early-mid-life, have no sense of the Miami real-estate market and spend basically everything they've got to squeeze into a little bungalow on Key Biscayne to be close to new job, most people would have bought a house somewhere in town for about half the price but they didn't even conceive of that option. 30 years pass. Colombian drug lords are having problems with people kidnapping their children in Colombia, so they've discovered Key Biscayne as a safe little refuge just a short plane ride away. Little bungalows like my friends' are being bought for millions and torn down to build McMansions for the unfortunate Colombians driven from their native homes by terrorists. Friends first moved to Austin to be closer to one of their offspring, after the reality of that got boring they set their sites on Vancouver as a "place that they always wanted to spend more time in."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday August 30 2020, @04:00AM
Yea, my parents emigrated straight to Vancouver back when the Canadian government would pay (interest free loan) for WASP's to immigrate. There first house was a rent to own about 6 miles from downtown, back when prices were reasonable. Now everyone wants to live here.