EDIT: since apparently a bunch of people woke up with the wrong foot this morning or forgot to check the group they’re in:
This is a joke. Do not steal or vandalize speed enforcement cameras (or anything else for that matter). That’s against the law and you will likely get arrested.
If you’re addicted to crack or any other drugs, please seek professional help.
Then let me specify:
Wide enough for one pickup and no opposing traffic, but so narrow that two pickups are going to really have to negotiate to move around each other.
Schools have more than one bus and they have to pass each other. There are also school buses for the other nearby schools like the middle school and high school running at the same time even when school starts times are offset.
No they don’t they can enter from the same side. You’re just looking for excuses. Also why do you need buses in the first place why aren’t the kids walking or biking.
You have one bus going in one direction to a school passing another bus going to another school.
Have you only lived in an inner city where roads can be one way because they alternate in direction every block?
??? If that’s your solution then why is there a road to begin with? Just ban cars. Simple.
In front of a school? Are your schools connected directly to highways or something?
We don’t have blocks.
Roads are typically 2 lanes one in each direction. You already know this because you said a solution would be to remove the lane marker.
So you have a road with an elementary school, and 2 miles further down is a middle school. Even without that you have buses passing each other during pickup because busses only pickup kids on one side of the street so you don’t have young kids crossing roads. So one bus runs in one direction down a road picking up kids direction down the road.
What do you call a section of inner city bounded on all sides by a road in your country?
I’m someone else.
Lots of questions here: Why can’t kids walk 500m to the next bus stop? Why are streets so unsafe so that kids can’t cross them?
Why assume that there’s no larger road in between those smaller roads? Roads generally form a hierarchy, you have big ones feeding into middle ones feeding into small ones. Small ones should absolutely be safe to cross, also without explicit crossings, because they’re traffic calmed and don’t have much traffic in the first place. That’s where houses and schools are, where there’s no through-traffic because even if they aren’t cul de sacs who would drive through a road you can’t drive fast on when there’s a mid-level road that you could take.
Straßenblock. Let me put it differently: We don’t have grids and nothing is regular. This is about as grid-y as it gets and if you zoom in you’ll notice that the interior streets have no lane markers and some even are cobbled. Those connect to a street ( south, Hallerstraße) with bike lanes (don’t need those on smaller streets because there’s not enough traffic to warrant them), which connects to a four-lane (plus bus lane) street, Grindelalle, west. The intersection looks a bit crazy but it’s actually safe for pedestrians and you should’ve learned how to cross streets safely and what traffic lights are in Kindergarten. You’ve also been there with your parents (going shopping or whatever) a lot of times, nothing scary really. That kind of density and housing is probably illegal to build where you are (it’s illegal pretty much everywhere in the US and Canada).
And mind you Hamburg is awful when it comes to urbanism, way too car-centric. Not because of lack of public transport but because politicians are unwilling to kill off car traffic and the whole city is full of rich fucks with too much disposable income.
I suggested banning cars.
“We don’t have blocks”
THAT TRANSLATES TO STREET BLOCK!
A block in the US doesn’t mean a square either.
I already suggested, “Just ban cars. Easy.”
It is required that children do not cross two lane roads to be picked up by school buses. I don’t make the rules. I don’t have a solution to US car culture. But making roads unpassable by school buses isn’t an answer.
Yes, great, blame a non native speaker for expressing himself incorrectly, correcting himself, and then quadruple down on it. I was thinking of unprioritised NY-style blocks you see all over the place in US cities, gridlock magnets. You know, places where people say “down the block” and generally measure distances in blocks.
If you look back at that Hamburg link, at those streets internal to the superblock, you’ll notice that they are wide enough for buses to go through. There’s no regular bus lines through there (there’s two metro stations and plenty of bus stops surrounding it) but a school bus isn’t regular service, it doesn’t need to play by the same rules. You can make a pickup at one of those very spacious intersections. It’s not being done because there’s schools in walking distance and German kids can cross roads but it could be done. Would you, however, ever speed on those roads.
My elementary school was 15 miles from my house. You think that’s a safe distance for a 6 year old to travel alone?
Let me look at a map… maybe 1km max anywhere in my 30k town to the next primary school and that’s when you’re living on the very very edge of town. Should be under 500m for most pupils.
If you’re living in a rural area, outside of the next village (which will have a school), which is an absolute exception as things tend to cluster into villages in rural areas, it might be 5km. Not really an issue with a bike, I biked what 3.5km to Kindergarten (together with my mom). If you have less density than that you probably should have boarding schools.
For secondary education, if you’re living in a village you’ll probably have to take the bus to the nearest city. Regular public transport though the schedule will take school times into account. Yes, kids can walk 500m to the nearest station.
Bonus: All that school density – smaller but way more of them – means that there’s obvious places to hold elections as there’s a municipality-owned place in Sunday stroll distance to pretty much everywhere. The only downside are the ludicrously low tables.
Above you wondered why we need buses and I said that when I was 6 I lived 15 miles (24 km) from my school (and it was suburban, not rural). You then said that your school was 3.5 km away. I don’t see how that answers my question.
US suburbia has a higher density than the German countryside, having to travel 24km is nuts. That’d be defensible if you live in a tiny settlement 24km from a place with more than two dozen houses – I’m sure those exist in the US but suburbia isn’t that.
How many pupils were there at your school? My state has 106240 pupils in 393 primary schools, that’s an average of 270. Minimum size under ordinary circumstances is 80, the smallest is on Nordstrandischmoor: An island, 18 inhabitants, five families, one school, one teacher, two students, here it is. That’s because we don’t do boarding in primary education so there’s a maximum tolerable commute time/distance, once those kids are old enough they’ll spend Monday through Friday on the mainland.
If your system insists that a school have at least 2k students or such then, yes, of course, walking to school will be an impossibility for most. Fix your school sizes and like 99% of students will be able to walk or bike, use buses or minivans or whatnot for the rest we do that too (not really possible in Nordstrandischmoor, thing doesn’t even have a ferry but a rail link that’s only usable when the tide is low).
And no it wasn’t my school it was my Kindergarten, which wasn’t, by a long shot, the closest to home it was the one my parents chose. I mentioned it to say that biking 3.5km is something a 4yold can do, physically, without any issue at all really.
Yup, if a school bus is coming then everyone going the other way better slow down and watch out!
It’s about not making it fit “comfortably”, not that it can’t fit at all. Drivers who feel uncomfortable naturally slow down and pay more attention.
Congratulations, you stumbled upon the key point of traffic calming!