When Children Walked to School

Our experiences walking to and from school were similar to those of most of our classmates. Their parents did not drive them to school or put them on a bus. They let them walk. That was not unusual in America in the 1960s and early '70s. But it is today. An article published in 2011 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine noted that 47.7% of students in kindergarten through eighth grade walked or biked to school in 1969. By 2009, that had dropped to just 12.7% of students. A survey published in this same journal in 2019 reported that...