I believe (and I could be wrong about this) that in the early 70s there was also a huge glut of elementary and middle-school aged kids–the last, largest wave of baby-boomers. More kids in elementary school would skew the statistics towards walking, as they tend to be closer.
Just to throw in my experience, which is different because I grew up in a rural state: If you live out in the country, you have to take the bus. I grew up in a small county where there was but two elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. (Well, I take that back, three elementaries until I was in the third grade; that’s when the Catholic school closed.)
Anyway, I walked to and from those first three years, and often home for lunch too; about five small-town blocks each way. Then my elementary school was still a little further away … across a cemetery and through some tobacco warehouses to the other side of town.
The middle school is located directly across the street from my old Catholic elementary, so I was back to walking. In high school, we moved out in the country, and I took the bus until my friends and I were old enough to drive, and then we either drove ourselves or carpooled with each other.
Looking back at all this, I realize how rather different and unique my upbringing was!
I walked to school every day for 12 years (went home for lunch in elementary school), and walked home from school. Quite a long ways, too, it took 20 minutes walking and 15 minutes running (through a smallish village with sidewalks). Probably the exercise did me a world of good. The sad part is, the school bus that transported bus riding kids home from school let them out one half a block away from my house; I couldn’t ride the bus because I didn’t live far away enough from the school!
I think this will extremely jurisdiction dependent. When my kids were in elementary school during the 70s and early 80s, there were kids who walked and those who were bussed. But with one exception in the early 80s no one was driven by a parent. The one mother who started doing in the early 80s was roundly criticized by the school committee (something like home and school, except it had a legal existence and the schools had two parent reps on the actual school board). Now, no one walks and it would be physically dangerous because the streets in front of the school have become a horrible traffic jam that I wouldn’t want my kids to have to deal with.
My kids used to come home for lunch; only the bussed kids stayed in school. Now no one comes home for lunch. It has truly become deplorable.
I’ve been noticing this. I have an elementary anda junior high school that back up on my backyard. I don’t ever see crossing guards on the streets around here, either adult or student.
I don’t know if the crossing guards are gone because the kids don’t walk any more, or if the kids don’t walk because the crossing guards are gone.
How do you count kids being walked by a parent?
My daughter did - but then we live across the street from the school, so home wasn’t much further than the lunch tables.
It was good. She could leave home when the bell started to ring and get to school before it stopped.
The kids in our development are dropped off at one single bus stop which is toward the front of the entrance into the development.
Parents regularly wait in their cars for their kids to get off the bus, hop in the car and are then driven home.
Now. The greatest distance from the bus stop to whatever house is located the furthest from the stop is no more than, I don’t know, certainly not a quarter of a mile and no more than a five-minute slow-walking-pace trip. And yet there are parents every day waiting to pick their kids up and drive them to their place. I can understand not wanting the kids to walk home unguarded by themselves though it is a relatively safe community and I could understand if it were a torrential downpour but this strikes me as the most ridiculous display of lazy-assing that you could imagine.
Just out of interest, were these stats for Australia (I think it’s Sydney where you live?) or the USA? I imagine there might be some social factors that are different for both. For instance, there has been some amalgamation of State schools over the last few decades, but not an awful lot, so I don’t imagine more people are far from a State school than they ever were. OTOH there’s been a big increase in private schooling, which probably involves kids being more spread out from their schools
Another thought -
My kids would take a bus - but we have them in before school care. So we drive them to school. You need to drive your kids to school if they participate in band (before school), chess club (before school), etc.
When I was in school there wasn’t anything going on before school opened. Few mothers worked - if they did they started after the kids left on the bus or made other arrangements (like a neighbor would watch them).
Even when I was 5 we used to make our own way to school. (From what I recall) this was a walk around the block from our house - maybe 15-20 minutes? I walked with my 18 month older brother.
When we moved house, we lived across the road, but after that we had a 30 minute cycle to school. I would have been around 10 or 11 at the time.
At highschool, yes we did take the bus (it was a rural, hilly area, cycling would have been a sweaty 45 minute affair at least) but we still had to walk to the bus stop.
When I moved to the “big city” it was a 15 miunute cycle (often in temperatures of 0-3 degrees centigrade)
My daughter, now 4.5 knows how to use a controlled intersection. She does not yet have the situational awareness to go out and cross roads by herself, but the understanding of the rules is already there. She will start school at 6, there is NO WAY that I will walk her to school or bring her home, I am not into wiping her backside for her.
I’m 48 and walked to my grade, junior high and high schools. And all three are closed now. Either school systems have consolidated schools to achieve efficiency (by increasing class sizes), the generations following me were smaller or my influence on the schools was so malign that they had to close them upon my leaving.
Oh, another possibility is that kids today are a bunch of lazy snots. And they should get off my lawn.