Kids on trains

I don't know whether this is more a difference between the U.S. and other places, or between rural/suburban and urban places.

I live in a small town in upstate New York. Elementary-school kids walk or bike to school, or their parents drive them. A 6-year-old might walk with her 11-year-old sister, but wouldn't walk by herself. And the 11-year-old is only as independent as she is because it's a small town where we know a lot of our neighbors and the traffic is very mild.

It's rather different from this article flagged here by Atrios. At the end of the schoolday the kids are gathered in the gym. The parents, in their cars, line up like airplanes waiting to land. As they pull in one by one to the single pick-up point, a staffer outside radioes in which kid to send out. The kid "is grabbed from the gym, escorted to the sidewalk and hustled into the car as if under enemy fire. His mom peels out and the next car pulls up. 'Sydney's mom is here!'"

Greensboro N.C. has about 260,000 people, so it's obviously not directly comparable to our laid-back town of 12,000. We and our neighbors probably wouldn't let 11-year-olds travel clear across town on their own, but neither would we treat the distance between the school door and the curb as if it were somebody else's free-fire zone.

But then consider Prague. This is a city of 1.2 million, and we see kids who are probably 10 or 12 years old, traveling solo through the subways, on the trolleys, walking along busy roads.

Some of this has to do with changes over time. When I was perhaps 9, my mom would send out a pack of kids bracketed by my 12-year-old sister on the old end and me on the young end. We would ride the MBTA from the suburbs, through downtown Boston, to the Science Museum. I was the navigator, my sister was the all-around Responsible Party. At age 12. Anecdotal evidence says that Americans don't do that anymore, and people chime in all over the place with stories of "when I was a kid." But in Prague, people still do send their kids off through the big city all on their lonesome.

And it's not that it's perfectly safe. Thinking about this question this morning on the trolley as we took the boys to school, I remembered an ad I saw in a newspaper not long after we got here, saying something to the effect of, "XX,XXX people were injured at crosswalks last year. School starts in a week. We'll be out in force ticketing drivers who break traffic laws." So people (including kids, some of them unchaperoned by an adult) get hurt on the streets, and presumably some of them die. But Czech parents still send their kids off into the city on their own.

If I get around to it, I'd be curious about some statistics comparing relative traffic injury rates here vs. the U.S.