Buses vs. Cars

No more walking on the beach. We're back home and I'm walking my usual route over to the park, around the track and back. But now it's a bit more challenging because school is back in session.

Why is it challenging? For starters, most of the streets around here don't have sidewalks. Not a big problem unless you have a lot of traffic. And now that school is back in session, there is a lot of traffic! Mostly cars, but a few buses. I typically encounter about three buses, each with an average of two kids on them. (Unless the little darlings are so short that their little heads don't extend past the top of the seat.) These aren't those cute little mini buses like the ones the daycare centers have. These are big, "you can take the entire team and pep squad" yellow school buses.

Why are the buses virtually empty? I don't know. You would have to ask the parents who are blocking normal traffic taking their kids to school. It might be the lack of sidewalks, but the streets are virtually traffic-free except for the parade of parents driving their kids to school. It is a parade that goes on for about 30 or more minutes. The elementary school is near my walking route. But the situation is the same at the middle school. If I want to play golf on Tuesday I need to leave 40 minutes earlier than when school isn't in session just so I can get through the queue of parents dropping their kids off at school. (It's a bit better driving by the high school because those kids are driving themselves and parking.)

When I was in elementary school, I walked for 20 minutes to get to school. It probably kept me fit. I walked in the rain and in the cold. Most days I walked back home for lunch and then back to school again. My mother only drove me if it was a thunderstorm or a torrential downpour. When we moved to the country when I was in junior high, my mother only drove me to school if I missed the bus. That's pretty much the only time I drove my son to school, too. Not that many kids could possibly miss the bus every day. Something else is going on. But what? I know that in high school it wasn't "cool" to ride the bus - but if my friend with a car was ticked off at me, I had to suck it up and ride the bus. Has this concept of "cool" extended all the way down to elementary school? I don't know.

I'll just have to wonder why the school tax dollars that I pay are used to pay for huge buses with two kids on them while parents are making the streets impassable lining up to drop off their kids.