A kid goes to daycare for what 3 years? If you have 2-3 kids and you don't wait 10 years in between these are just 10 years of your life.

Meaning what, it's not worth owning a vehicle for a 10 year span? Be serious.

Meaning this is a moot point for most of your life.

10 years does not make a moot point.

Eh. For all my kids' daycare career I dropped them off by bike. Given the distance and route it was faster than driving. It really depends on the distances involved, road layout, cycling infrastructure, geography, weather, etc... Not many universals here.

This depends very much on local circumstances. In our local daycare in Amsterdam, probably 3/4 of dropping and picking up was done by bike. Even at that level, using a car is often slower due to tightness of parking space.

I was recently obliged for the first time to drop my son off at school by car. It took 50% longer than cycling. I can't understate the temporal dimension of using a car. When dropping and picking up a kid at school...etc etc

You're not representative of how this usually works, and you know it.

You mean the long rows of cars queueing one constantly see outside US schools aren't representative? I'd say it takes far longer to pick someone up in a car than a bike..

Only if you live that close by. And I've never seen a long queue.

If you're in the US, it's likely that you either don't drive by schools when they're letting out, or you live in a place that has the right combination of density and poor kids to limit the driver pick-ups. None of the 5 places across 4 states where I've lived in the last 10 years have avoided the pickup line phenomenon.

You seem to have missed that this comment chain focused on daycare to begin with, not school. There's no bus for that.

Daycares vary in size. You can opt for institutions that watch after 30 kids at a time, or ones run out of houses, but one way or another if both you and your spouse work for a living, you need someone to watch your kid, and it will probably require daycare and by extension commuting. If you live in the suburbs, you drive.