Kids Gotta Walk

Colmunist Froma Harrop had an interesting piece in my local paper today. She noted the growing obesity rate among children, and noted that part of the problem is that children have no opportunities to walk to school because the suburban-sprawl municipalities in which many of them live have the schools too far away from anywhere to walk to, and usually it's too dangerous to walk owing to lack of sidewalks and too much traffic. And so they take school buses. Harrop cited a few studies showing that where cities and towns are more compact, and neighborhoods have their own local schools, obesity rates among children are less because more children walk. Sadly, though, not all children walk to school where they can, because their mothers insist on driving them anyway, no doubt afraid that their kids can disappear if they walk to and from school without parental supervision.

Nonetheless, some interest in bringing back the tradition of allowing kids to walk to school - or anywhere else, for that matter - is gaining support. Harrop notes that in many towns where children can walk to school, community activists are trying to save schools in local neighborhoods and resisting central "warehouse" schools for children to be bused to. Harrop also predicts that more people will demand a saner way of developing communities that will allow children to walk to schools, parks, or stores and develop a sense of self-reliance. While I hope she's right, I take her predictions - including a prediction that the Medicare reform fiasco will come back to haunt Bush - with a grain of salt. Last summer, Harrop predicted that Gray Davis would survive the California recall because voters would recognize a bad idea when they saw one. So what's Davis been doing lately? :-O