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by sensanaty·2y ago·view on hn ↗
The majority (dare I say all?) of European kids just take public transport/their bikes to wherever they're going, from a young age. I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day to go to my swim practice starting from age 10, sometimes at night too.

I don't really think soccer moms are a thing outside of the US

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The percentage of commutes by car in Northern and Southern European cities ranges from 50% to 75%

I’m not sure where Americans get the idea Europeans don’t commute by car.

We're talking about kids here though, not all commuters.

And at least in the Netherlands, sample size of my office (around 300 people) maybe a dozen people max commute by car because they live ~2 hours away or in tiny villages where the trains are only hourly rather than every 10 minutes. I'd assume that metric varies a lot depending on the country you're looking at, and if we're talking about how kids go to school/practice/wherever, I'm willing to bet even in car-heavy European countries that the vast majority of kids take public transport or their bikes.

I have friends with kids in the (rural) North of the Netherlands, and their kid's school is ~15km away from their house. The kids bike that every day, to quote my friend, "they've got legs and wheels, why would I chauffeur them around?"

"The majority" seems strong. When I was in middle school (collège in french), there was a long line of cars in front of the school entrance from parents dropping off their kids. At some point my friend and I started to take the RER to go back home, and we barely saw anyone else.

Of course, part of the situation was we were in a mostly-residential city, so most kids lived less than a twenty minutes' walk away. But those who didn't mostly came by car.

That's in the city, though. I don't know what things are like in the countryside. From what my friends tell me, they had to take a lot of public bus to go to school and places. I think soccer moms were more of a thing there, because you had a hard time getting anywhere without a car. Less hard than the US, but still.

>I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day to go to my swim practice starting from age 10, sometimes at night too.

This sounds terrible. I would much prefer driving 10 minutes to my suburban sports complex.

Statistically Europeans have longer commutes than Americans because they rely on public transport more while Americans drive and driving is almost always faster than surface public transport since not all Europeans have an underground in their city so public transport is often a slow an infrequent bus in tier 2 cities.
The more people drive, the worse the traffic. And if public transport has to be stuck in traffic, then driving is always faster.

Now this setting sounds familiar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

> I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day

And you'd take that 1.5hr each way (three hours of commute to go to swim practice, every day??) over having a parent (or a family friend carpooling) spend maybe 10-15 minutes driving you each way?