Why Parents Drive Children to School

This line from a NY Times article really hits a nerve with me:

"Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce. According to local news reports, the officer told Mrs. Pierce that if anything untoward had happened to the boy, she could have been charged with child endangerment. Many felt the officer acted appropriately and that Mrs. Pierce had put her child at risk. "

And where are the police insuring our neighborhoods are safe? I guess its just not their job. Say what? Not the job of the police for public safety?

But that is not really the issue, the issue is strangers are not to be trusted and we as a society don't even know the people who live on our block let alone a mile away. We are not outside enough to get to know those who live nearby so all are strangers not to be trusted. But start riding your bike around or anything outside around your house and after awhile you'll meet other people who are outside and soon the whole world is your freind.

Say what? There are no safe places to bike or walk in your neighborhood because of overly car centric roadway designs? Heavy sigh, is this really the kind of world we want to create?

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NY Times, Why Can’t She Walk to School? <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13kids.html?ref=style">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13kids.html?ref=style</a>;

Related:
Why Parents Drive Children to School: Implications for Safe Routes to School Programs

Abstract
Problem: Rates of walking and bicycling to school have declined sharply in recent decades, and federal and state governments have committed funds to reverse these trends. To increase rates of walking and biking to school will require understanding why many parents choose to drive their children to school and how well existing programs, like Safe Routes to School, work.

Purpose: We aimed to understand why many parents choose to drive their children even short distances to school, and what implications this has for programs to increase walking and biking to school.

Methods: We used data from a telephone survey to explore why parents drive their children to school.

Results and conclusions: We found that 75% of parents driving their children less than 2 miles to school said they did this for convenience and to save time. Nearly half of parents driving their children less than 2 miles did not allow their child to walk to school without adult supervision. Accompanying a child on a walk to school greatly increases the time the household devotes to such a trip. Few Safe Routes to School programs effectively address issues of parental convenience and time constraints.

Takeaway for practice: Safe Routes to School programs should take parental convenience and time constraints into account by providing ways children can walk to school supervised by someone other than the parent, such as by using walking school buses. To be effective, such programs need institutional support. Schools should take a multimodal approach to pupil transportation.

Research support: This research was funded by the Active Living Research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the U.S. and California Departments of Transportation through the University of California Transportation Center.
<a href="http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a912822971">http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a912822971</a>;