> My 12 year old can take the subway to school by himself, but ONLY if he has a phone in case he ends up in some wackadoodle situation where his train has gone express or is on another train line and he needs to call his lifeline (me!) to figure out how to work it out.
I was taking the subway to school by myself at 12 in Toronto (maybe a slightly less intense city, to be fair). I'm not sure about NYC but in Toronto it's possible to teach a kid a set of strategies where they'll basically never get dangerously-lost.
Just find the nearest bus, and get on it. Stay on it until it arrives at a subway station. Ask a transit worker at the station if necessary. Get on another bus or subway that gets you a little closer in the right direction. It can take a while but you can follow this algorithm rather blindly and it will get you there. (The system was designed that way, I think.)
I never got lost. And if I had gotten lost, I wouldn't have been in any particular danger. At a certain age they'll have to figure out "oh, there's no bus, what do I do?" on their own. (At the time, I did not like this whole take the subway on my own thing - scared the heck out of me. I had to be coached with multiple trial runs.)
In Berlin, at that age I didnt need anybody to explain the system to me anymore. Just use a map.
The NYC subway is on a whole 'nother level. Things like local trains suddenly running express because of crowding, or temporary service patterns like „the J-train is now running on the F-line between 22nd and 58th“ (u have to know from context thats Manhattan, not Brooklyn). And of course these announcements ate barely discernible, the loudspeakers require 15 years of training to understand.
> The only place I’ve personally witnessed wide spread mass transit use for youth in school is Japan.
Kids have been able to ride the busses around Seattle for free for many years now (and before that, during the summer for free). It's worked out pretty well. Or at least the program as continued, and I've seen a lot of kids using the city busses.
Definitely a better system than yellow school busses.
And it's normal to see young kids walk to school unattended in Seattle. I live near an elementary school and see it every day. Totally unusual in much of the rest of the US.
I remember being on a train in the Bavarian countryside and was puzzled when at one stop it was suddenly filled with 10-13 year olds. Then I realized the time made about sense for school to let out. They got off at the next few stops
This happens fairly frequently in Vancouver Canada, although it's not from regular school commuting (we do have special school busses), but rather from daycamps that find public transit to be the best solution vs. renting a private bus; but also — perhaps surprisingly — school field trips, which seem to often find "just get on a city bus" simpler to arrange than getting the public schoolbus system(?) to get drivers to work a special spot shift hauling kids to who-knows-where.
Interesting, where I grew up school children could not use public transport (while at school at least). We had our own bus system (which was superior to the public transport) and sometimes used private for-hire buses.
I have seen a few young kids in school uniforms on the tube in London. Most, but not all, seem to have a chaperone. Two or three young kids traveling together is not unusual. We only noticed it because it is becoming unusual to see kids walking to school even here in rural America. They all get dropped off until they are old enough to drive (14/15 here). It probably does not help that community schools are getting replaced with massive schools on the outskirts (where large parcels of land are still available) of town.
I'd suggest a simpler algorithm. Just ask the transit worker what to do—all NYC stations have one, if not in the uptown entrance than in the downtown one—and do whatever they say.
I was taking the subway to school by myself at 12 in Toronto (maybe a slightly less intense city, to be fair). I'm not sure about NYC but in Toronto it's possible to teach a kid a set of strategies where they'll basically never get dangerously-lost.
Just find the nearest bus, and get on it. Stay on it until it arrives at a subway station. Ask a transit worker at the station if necessary. Get on another bus or subway that gets you a little closer in the right direction. It can take a while but you can follow this algorithm rather blindly and it will get you there. (The system was designed that way, I think.)
I never got lost. And if I had gotten lost, I wouldn't have been in any particular danger. At a certain age they'll have to figure out "oh, there's no bus, what do I do?" on their own. (At the time, I did not like this whole take the subway on my own thing - scared the heck out of me. I had to be coached with multiple trial runs.)