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