When I was a boy, my brothers and I walked more than 2 miles every weekday. This was because we lived a little bit more than a mile from the school we attended.

Our home was in the Dominican neighborhood of San Rafael, California, which was named for Dominican College, the then-all-girls Catholic college that was located there. Our school was at St. Raphael Parish, the home of Mission San Rafael, which was founded by Spanish Franciscan missionaries in 1817.

Our route took us through a pleasant residential neighborhood of single-family homes and then into the business center of the town.

Directly across the street from our school and church stood the old Marin County Courthouse, which was built in 1873 that would have looked at home sitting on the mall in Washington, D.C.

On the other side of the courthouse was Fourth Street, which was San Rafael’s main street. It was lined with small family-owned businesses and served in 1972 as one of the filming locations for George Lucas’ cruising movie, “American Graffiti.”

As we walked home from school each day, my brothers and I walked past some interesting places. At the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Fifth Street, for example, stood a brown-shingle house that the Grateful Dead used as their office space starting in 1970, when I was still in grammar school.

A block and a half down Lincoln from the Dead’s office was a delicatessen owned by one of the families in our parish. They made great sandwiches, using locally baked sourdough bread.

Immediately next door to the Dead’s office on Fifth Street was a family-owned grocery store run by the grandfather of one of my classmates.

When we had a nickel to spare, my brothers and I would stop there on the way home from school to buy a pack of baseball cards. One of my younger brothers and I had an annual competition with each other to see who would be the first to collect all of the cards for that year’s San Francisco Giants team.

Our experiences walking to and from school were similar to those of most of our classmates. Their parents did not drive them to school or put them on a bus. They let them walk.

That was not unusual in America in the 1960s and early ’70s. But it is today.

An article published in 2011 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine noted that 47.7% of students in kindergarten through eighth grade walked or biked to school in 1969. By 2009, that had dropped to just 12.7% of students.

A survey published in this same journal in 2019 reported that 16.5% of parents said “their youngest child walks to or from school at least once during a usual week.”