$612 million to walk or bike to school
And you'd think walking would be free. Thanks to years of poor planning and an increasingly lazy (sorry, "busy") population, the U.S. federal government, through the Department of Transportation, is spending $612 million for a program called Safe Routes to School in about 20 states. This program sets out to "help build sidewalks, post traffic signs and find ways to make it easier for students to bike or walk to school."
While I like the result - parents and children biking to school together, kids tromping together in a little pack called a "walking bus" - it speaks volumes that we need to spend so much money to provide communities with sidewalks so it's safe for small children to walk to school. The AP's article on this program says that only 15 percent of kids "travel to school under their own power," so there's certainly a lot of improvement that's possible. While school buses make sense for kids who live far away from school, it's simply common sense to have kids in town get a little exercise at the start and end of each school day. Nobody tell Chris Goodall.
[Source: Daniel Yee, Associated Press]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dave Schmetterer 11:37AM (10/27/2007)
If the volumes it is speaking of are that intelligent urban patterns have been rejected by everyone out there who should know better, and that sprawl is the most coherent school of urban planning philosophy we have, you are right.
But this (and that) is old news. Safe Routes is a great program, keeping cars off the road is the greenest kind of automotive development out there.
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Dave Schmetterer 11:43AM (10/27/2007)
and just to be clear, the "everyone who should know better" doesn't refer to EVERYONE everyone - but lots of people making decisions about our settlement patterns and urban forms have allowed this to happen.
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