Gawd, that school was overcrowded (not to mention overrated) 10 years ago. Where are they going to put all those organic, locally-sourced children? The problem isn't the number of babies, yuppies are still only around 1.5 kids/family, but rather overcrowding in the community.
So I found this comment in the first article linked in the thread interesting: What will happen to the retiring boomers who are stuck in the suburbs or have to sell their homes at discount? And will the poor/immigrants necessarily move into the nice leafy suburbs with low walk scores?
See, as a first time parent of a kindergartener, I appreciate the free* busing but wish the school was in walking distance. Bus arrival time is inflexible and inconsistent. *I know, nothing is actually free. But I'm sure we'll talk about the high cost of free parking in this thread soon enough.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2...NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20120903 This is pretty cool. City blocks stacked sideways. Berlin: NYC: Paris: Istanbul:
Just biked with my 11 yo son and 4 other kids 3.25 miles to school this morning (Rather than the bus). Its also a round about way for me to bike to my office. The ride includes crossing a 4 lane state highway (with traffic lights) Anyway, I post it on Facebook just so the other parents know that they arrived. Friends post asking how do I get them home? "I replied, they are big kids, they figure it out pretty quick." I swear it stunned some folks out there to let 5 11 yo's how to problem solve a bike ride.
From a commuter perspective, you really don't want parents dropping off and picking up their kids from school, do you? That's a lot of cars on the road. If my route takes me past a school, I'd rather deal with 30 buses rather than 1200 cars.
I've seen similar stunned looks when I tell people that when I was a kid in the summer time we'd bike to the schoolyard to play baseball. If there weren't enough kids there, we'd bike to another schoolyard, and another. Eventually, we'd have enough for two teams, one field closed maybe, but no pitcher's hand. Might be three miles from home before it happened, playing with a bunch of kids we didn't know, but no worries. If we were late getting home, Dad would just go from one school yard to another until he found us. Now, I realize that suburbanization has made this impossible in many places, and some other places have too much traffic for this to be feasible, but it's too bad. I'd like to see places make a commitment to making towns more kid friendly in ways that my town was (and so far as I know, is).
I've often wondered a lot about this mobility timidness on the part of kids these days. Who's to blame for this, coddling parents or are kids just getting wussier these days? When I was 10-12 years old, I wasn't conscious about built environment quality, lack of "walkability" never discouraged me from going around the neighborhood and doing stuff. I'm only 30, so it's not like I lived that long ago where things were drastically different. I lived in a suburban built environment from about 5th grade until I finished high school every bit as boring and unpleasant to walk and bike in as your typical suburban area today, and it never stopped me from walking or biking to the lake or the rec center or 7-11 or Burger King or wherever. A few years ago, my niece who was in 6th grade at the time and lived in an newer suburban area went to school like literally a quarter mile (two football field lengths, ffs) away from where she lives and one day her mom (my sister) forgot to pick her up from school, and she waited and waited at school, there sobbing when my sister finally remembered....I was like, are you kidding me? You couldn't hoof it four blocks through residential streets? Both of my parents worked, so I was on my own a lot, maybe that was why? (hmmm)
This article: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/amsterdam.html Was linked in yours. I spent the better part of 2 years in and around A'dam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague over a dozen business trips. I made the mistake of renting a car once, after that it was all walking and various transit forms (trains, trams, subways and buses) and even rented bikes to get around Amsterdam, which I would recommend to everyone as a bucket list item. The bigger irony was that almost all of the Dutch I worked with drove to work daily.
Greatness doesn't have to compare itself to others or look into its past, it just knows, and does. Relic.
Rivington and Ludlow, LES of ManHattan (I know you know this, more for the out of towners, so they don't go around saying that the picture is some corner in Brooklyn) cool piece about the shooting of the cover
This article is interesting, and not only because they are the first reputable source (besides me, of course) to combine the words "Dystopian" and "Williamsburg."