FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS: The Agony of the School Car Line: It’s crazy-making and deeply inefficient. “A few generations ago, in 1969, nearly one in two kids walked or biked to school. Now only about one in 10 kids gets to school those ways. And only about a third of children who live within just one mile of school walk or bike there.”

Well, this is because the usual destructive interplay of upper-middle-class women and news media has made people too fearful to let their kids walk to school, and the state child-welfare people — who have been known to go after parents for letting their kids simply play outside — hover in the background making people afraid to do it. But the real problem, as always, is parents (mostly mothers, to be honest) not so much worried about actual safety as about what other parents (mostly mothers, to be honest) will think.

And there’s a bus driver shortage because undisciplined kids and hovering parents make driving a school bus a deeply unappealing proposition.