Walking home from school in many areas is perfectly safe. In other areas it's not. Making blanket statements or restrictions without context doesn't make sense.
The article is literally about how location effects are driving the changes.
> Pick one. If you knew the statistics on kidnapping in the US, you would not think of this as a “life-style” choice.
Child abduction is extremely rare in the United States.
You might be confusing sensational headlines with statistics. It's common to report missing children or parental disputes as kidnapping, which people conflate with children being abducted off the street
Here's an article about it with some real statistics from the FBI: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
For some perspective: The number of children abducted by strangers in the United States every year is similar to the number of children who die from head injuries from riding a bike: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8909479/
More people in the United States die from lightning strikes every year.
Discussing the practicality aspect is literally the point of the article.
Above I was addressing your arguments about danger and kidnappers.
Building primarily low-density car-dependent suburbs is a choice. Building horribly oversized car infrastructure is a choice. Not building bike or pedestrian infrastructure is a choice. Building one megaschool instead of a handful of smaller local schools is a choice.
People voted to have slightly lower taxes and spend a few hours a week waiting in the pickup line. That's a lifestyle choice, even if they weren't aware they were making it.
You keep accusing other people of living in a bubble, but you're indexing your entire experience on to anecdotes of where you grew up as an individual experience.
It's like the man who has happened on "several" three-alarm fires in his life. How many times does a person happen on even one three-alarm fire in a lifetime? Let alone "several". The likelihood you're either speaking to an arsonist or a liar is very high.
Same is true for people who are robbed at gunpoint "several" times. The statistical likelihood that you're either speaking to a criminal or a liar is extremely high.
Child abduction by strangers is extremely rare: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
Where was this? Most places in the US are not this susceptible to random violence. In the suburban city I grew up in, I'd walk home from school and I never saw a firearm in public when I was a kid, aside from those carried by police.
Edit: no one told these parents to drive up for pick up like a drive-through. In most cases, it is a choice. You can opt to park like a normal person and walk up. This article is absurd. Most of these parents are too lazy to walk 5 minutes. I’ve seen parents show up 40 minutes to be first in queue…just so they don’t have to get out of their cars. Makes zero sense.