Now, parents are so paranoid that they won't let their kids walk a couple of BLOCKS to school.<p>

Yes ... if they don't get killed or robbed by gang members or drugged by drug dealers, they might just get run over by the motorized monsters that all the other parents use to drive their kids to school. :P

Anyway. I used to walk to elementary school, which was a shorter distance away than from the gate to the actual school building of some American schools, and rode a bike to secondary school, like most of my classmates.