Why walk/bike your kid to school?

David Henry has a very nice commentary in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in which he talks about the advantages of walking or biking your children to school, and what we have lost by making it nearly impossible for many children to do so:

According to a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 66 percent of kids walked to school thirty years ago. Today, the figure is about 13 percent. Most parents are just not willing to let their children walk to school alone anymore.

But when kids are driven to school instead of walking, they miss things. They miss that unstructured time of connecting with their community. They miss the simple regular exercise of walking. No wonder there's been an epidemic of obesity among children. Worse still, the flood of cars dropping off and picking up kids creates traffic jams around schools, spewing tons of harmful emissions into the air.