Did 12 year olds take the subway to school 20, 30 years ago?
(Genuinely asking, never lived in a place with a subway, but took the bus all the time at that age.)
(Genuinely asking, never lived in a place with a subway, but took the bus all the time at that age.)
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.
(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.)
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.
They have my number memorized.
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.
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.