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I can't tell about NYC, but they certainly did in Europe and still do. It's probably not too common though, most of kids have school close to their home.

What does close mean? So close that they can walk there instead of using the subway?

I can speak of my case in Barcelona, I used to walk to schools since I was around 11-12. A 20 minutes walks in a pretty centric location, also took the seldom bus/metro to go there or visit some friend.

Okay, but presumably most school kids don't live in pretty centric locations.

In my country, middle schools are small, so a 10k city can have 3-4, and most kids do indeed live in centric locations, which mean only a fourth of them at most don't walk/bike there.

Also, you get assigned a public school depending on where you live (the closest) so unless you go to a private school, you're going to the closest one.

Schools in Western countries have "catchment areas" — a Voronoi diagram, for each level of schooling, that clusters residences by which school is closest to them. If you're sending your child to public (rather than private) school in one of these countries, then your child is assigned to a school based on which catchment area your home falls into. You can't send your child to a school other than the closest one to you.

(Yes, this means that a large part of housing prices in these urban areas is driven by parents or soon-to-be-parents fighting over the housing that exists in the catchment areas of the best public schools.)

This is usually combined in civic planning with a "service radius" around the school, to decide when new schools are needed (vs. just expanding existing schools.) For rural areas, the service radius is defined by practicable bus pickup loops (you don't want a bus that takes an hour to get to the school); but in dense urban areas, that radius is usually defined by walkability — on little child-sized legs!

The combination of the concepts of "catchment area" + "service radius" means that if you live in a city in one of these countries, it's almost impossible that you're going to live somewhere where your child fundamentally cannot walk to school (purely in terms of distance.) Which is a major reason why everyone makes fun of people in cities in the US (which uses both of these concepts in most municipalities) for driving their kids to school, when that school is by law a distance away that the kid could walk.

(I know that the problem in the US often isn't the distance, but what's between the home and the school — dangerous major thoroughfares with no sidewalks cutting through neighbourhoods and the like. Which is still the US being dumb; just on a different level.)

USian here, my daughters high school will be over 9 miles away and crosses 2 major interstate exchanges. Google says it's a 3 hour walk. The school itself is in the middle of nowhere and pretty much demands that kids be driven or bussed to it.

That's what you get when you design a country around vehicles. High school here in NL is a 3 km bike ride. In rural areas that can go up quite a bit but it's still doable by bike except for some of our smaller islands.

Growing up in my area of Michigan there was a concept called school-of-choice (which a school has to opt into.) If so, any student can attend that school and not only ones within it's designated area.

From own experience, yes. When I switched to 8th grade it was a bit further, so I biked there.

In the Netherlands, elementary, primary and secondary schools are all in walking or cycling distance (and we have good cycling infrastructure), that is, elementary schools are in <5 km radius from residential areas, secondary schools <10 kilometers, which is doable in about half an hour of cycling.

For follow-up education - and this is generally from age 16 onwards - you often need to head to a near city or provincial capital, but the government offers a free public transit scheme if you need to travel for that.

Personally, my preschool was literally around the corner (a five minute walk, although I had tiny legs), primary school was a 500 meter walk, secondary school was a kilometer, tertiary education one (associate's degree) was in the next town over (5 kilometer bike ride), tertiary education two (bachelor's degree) was in the province capital (25 kilometer bus ride).

IMO this is how towns and communities should be designed.

30 years ago i rode my bicycle to school on public roads. without a helmet.

Around here 6y old kids take the bus.

I took SF MUNI to & from school in second grade. I took GG Transit to the city from 9-14 y/o and then MUNI when I got there. I also took the ferries and BART fairly regularly as well. All by myself.

Of course, all the time. I didn't grow up in NYC, but all my friends that went to school here took the subway or bus to middle or high school on their own. I've been in the city for a decent amount of time now (16-ish years) and I've always seen lots of young kids on public transit after school lets out.

I grew up just outside of Boston and my parents let me take the commuter rail to north station and the T over to Cambridge with friends as an early teenager. It never felt like a big deal, you just learned to read a subway map and a train time table. If you got lost you asked for directions.

Very much unclear why I got down-voted for a pretty uncontroversial comment? I guess people didn't like that I took the train as a kid in the 90s before smartphones?

In Madrid my son did, ten years ago.

20 or 30 years ago, there were pay phones everywhere. I might not have carried a phone in middle school, but I did carry quarters that I could use to call my parents if anything ever went seriously sideways.

I don’t let me kids have phones and I force them to be out and about in town on their own (way smaller town than NYC). I tell them I’d they ever need to get in touch with me, just find the nearest stranger and ask to make a call. Literally anyone would let a kid call their mom.

They have my number memorized.

People I know who grew up in NYC - most of whom were in primary school 30-40 years ago - mostly took the bus or the subway to school, yes, unless it was close enough to walk.

Yes, we did. NYC even gives out student Metrocards that provide free transit to kids.

I took a 30 minute ferry ride and then subway to school each day in NYC ;)

And kids still do it.

Heck, outside my middle school in NYC, they had a line-up specifically for regular transit buses that were scheduled to stop there just when school let out. The only kids that qualified for yellow school bus service were those that lived more than a half a mile from a bus/subway stop.

Absolutely. And the funny thing is, it was more dangerous then. It is an objective fact supported by all available data that there are fewer kidnappings today than ever before. But since s kidnapping in Topeka goes around the world in 30 seconds, people hear more about all kidnappings happening everywhere, and think they are happening more often.