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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Liability issues? Corporate sponsorship? The Safe Routes to School program has encouraged thousands of kids to get out of their cars and onto their feet, but what ever happened to a simple stroll?
Oct 13, 2004 | When Andy Clark, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based League for American Bicyclists, speaks to parent groups about bicycling and walking, he likes to toss out the following query: How many people walked to school when they were children? The answer, he says, is always roughly the same: about 75 percent. But when he asks the same group how many have kids who walk to school today, the figure drops to 25 percent.
In our post-bipedal world, the youngest generation is spending mornings and afternoons -- you guessed it -- in the back seat of mom or dad's car. "It has taken us 50 years to destroy our ability to walk," said Clark. "And it will take 50 years to get it back again."
Over the past two decades, transportation activists have focused efforts on redirecting state and federal transportation funds away from cars and road building toward bicycle, pedestrian and mass transit alternatives. By all accounts, their efforts are succeeding. Between 1973 and 1991, the 50 states spent a total of $40 million on bike and walk infrastructure improvements. By contrast, expenditures on bike lanes, sidewalks and pedestrian trails now total $422 million per year, an order of magnitude greater -- albeit still a paltry 1 percent of the country's total transportation budget.
The increase in bike and pedestrian spending started with the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, an overhaul of the highway transportation bill. It established categories of funds for local projects that contributed to air-quality standards, as well as a wide range of bicycle and pedestrian projects.
Fifteen years later, a new program is rising to the top in the bike-walk hierarchy. It's called Safe Routes to School, a rapidly expanding 4-year-old effort that coordinates transportation, health and education agencies to get children walking and biking to school. Statewide Safe Routes programs are already underway in California, Washington and Wisconsin, and the pending reauthorization of the highway and transit bill, TEA-3, contains a $1 billion appropriation for a federal Safe Routes to School program.
"It has the potential to become one of the best ways to improve conditions for walking and biking," said Clark, describing the broad cross-section of Safe Routes supporters, including parents and teachers, health agencies and urban planners. "There's an unassailable coalition."
Sharon Roerty, director of community programs at the National Center for Bicycling and Walking in Bethesda, Md., concurs. "Safe Routes to School means a better walking and biking environment for everyone," she said. "We picked schools because that's motherhood and apple pie. But it could be a senior center; it could be a train station."
But if Safe Routes to School is a case study in successful grass-roots organizing, the story behind it also unfolds as a classic -- and damning -- parable of contemporary American culture. Once a national pastime taken for granted by millions of children, walking to school is, under Safe Routes, a multimillion-dollar effort orchestrated by adults and branded with its own catchy acronym: SR2S. The collapse of walking as a natural activity and its rebirth as a public-private partnership suggests the intermodal equivalent of a society gone mad -- an Alice in Wonderland state of affairs spotlighted by the corporate sponsorship and liability-insurance measures described in SR2S toolkits.
Through engineering, enforcement, education and encouragement mechanisms, Safe Routes to School seeks to challenge the supremacy of the automobile in people's lives -- along with its inevitable adjuncts, fear and isolation. But the real measure of the program's success, suggests David Engwicht, an Australian traffic consultant who pioneered SR2S concepts such as the Walking School Bus, will be the withering away of its own apparatus.
"One of the major problems with SR2S," said Engwicht via e-mail, "is that we have forgotten the larger goal -- independent mobility for children."
