I was reading an article and this assertion was put forward - 75% of kids are driven to school now, whereas in the 1970s 80% of kids used to walk to school. I tend to believe this is probably true. I’m sure there is a lot of evidence for percentages now. But is there any evidence for the figure from the 1970s?
I doubt whether there were many studies.
Actually, there were probably an awful lot of studies being done, as the desegregation busing programs were mostly implemented in the late 70s.
ETA: Here you go- http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/kidswalk/then_and_now.htm
If you had said “walked to school or rode a bus” rather than “walked to school” I would have found the 80% believable. I went to school in the 60’s and 70’s (yes, busses had been invented then) and almost everyone rode them. The notion that 75% of children are driven to school may be true if you consider riding a bus as “driven”, otherwise it is silly.
This is extremely site specific. I went to urban schools in the 1960s and almost everybody walked. Rides were few and only a small minority rode buses.
I’m sure buses predominated in suburban schools, but that’s different from almost everyone.
Original report from 1969 (pdf) v. comparitive data from 2001 (pdf). If you include riding on a schoolbus as being driven to school, over 80% of kids are driven nowadays, but in 1969, the number being driven was still over 50%. Changing population distributions (more people living farther from schools, in other words) is partly responsible for that.
I, on the other hand, never rode a bus until I entered high school for a very simple reason – I went to four different elementary schools, all within walking distance.
The older suburb I now live in was throwing up schools right and left during the baby boom years – at its height it was operating 12 elementary schools. Now there are six covering the same geographic area.
That’s one of the reasons cited in the report. There are actually fewer schools today than there were 40 years ago, even though there are more total students. It stands to reason that at least some of today’s kids live farther away from school.
Ditto what kunilou said. The town I grew up in in the 1960’s had about 6-8 elementary schools, two junior highs, and one high school. In elementary school most kids walked, and in high school most kids took the bus. I was not aware of anyone who got driven by parents on a regular basis.
Anecdotal evidence: I walked (or bikeed) my butt to school every damn day from 1st grade until I learnt to drive.
My oldest is going to be a high school senior next year and has never walked to school.
Back in the 1960s I was driven to school, and so were most of my friends.
But I walked home – from the time I was 4 until my senior year in high school. And the high school was more than a mile away.
Not only did I walk to school from kindergarten to 8th grade, after 1st grade I walked home for lunch almost every day. We lived less than 3 blocks from the school.
In South Suburban Chicago, we were desegregated in the early 70s, around 1972. We still walked. It took me between 30 - 40 minutes to walk to my new school. It used to take only 10 minutes at my local school.
But by 1980, almost all the kids in the same area going to the same school had to take the bus. So there was a change in the attitude toward kids walking to school.
The link shows that far more students of high school age drive than of grade school age. I’d be interested in seeing more of a breakdown for the 6 - 12 age group. I walked the five blocks to my elementary school starting in 2nd grade (late '50s.) I live across from an elementary school, and I guess more than 50% get driven, and most kids who don’t get driven get walked by a parent, with older kids being more likely to walk alone. Just about everyone who goes to this school lives in easy walking distance, and my neighborhood is fairly safe (except for one mother killed walking her child home - but that was an ethnic thing.) Almost no one comes by bus.
Most people walked to my junior high. I did, but the nearest bus stop in that direction was in front of the junior high, thanks to the Long Island Expressway being in the way.
I got very cheap bus fare to high school. If buses are more expensive now, that might explain why there is more use of private autos.
I walked to school up to Grade 4. After that I had to take a bus because the schools my parents wanted to send me to simply were not within walking distance.
Why on earth would you not count busing as “being driven to school”?
not only did many kids walk to school, they also went home for lunch!
there were many more schools than now. in my neighbourhood, there were 6 catholic schools and 2 public for elementary with in 10-15 blocks. now there is only 1 public and 1 catholic in the same range.
Well, catching a school bus, catching a regular public transit bus and being driven by a parent would seem to be different modes, even though in each case the student is being driven.
I walked to primary school in both England and Australia, because the school was close enough to walk. I caught a train to high school in Australia, except for my penultimate year, when I was too far from my school to travel. (I was in England, my school was the New South Wales Correspondence School in Sydney, Australia – it’s hard to live much further from your school than that!)
Sure, they’re different, but the OP only differentiated between walking and being driven.
Should have said that I am interested in difference between kids independently making it to school vs not
Anecdote: My nephew lives very near a suburban elementary school (maybe same distance as 1-2 city blocks), but they still bus him since they don’t want to supply crossing guards or risk accident crossing the road.
+1. It used to be that every community had its local high school. Nowadays kids are bussed to the mega-super-plex high school across the county.