How to get kids out of the car and onto their feet or a bike

John Wetmore (who is involved with the excellent "Perils for Pedestrians" TV series that communities can obtain to show on local public access TV channels) has created an excellent summary of how and why to get kids out of the car and onto their feet or a bike on the way to school:

Lisa Finnerty moved from a walkable neighborhood in Chicago to an automobile-oriented neighborhood in Montecito, Calif. What was the impact on her children? "It's a very difficult thing for them to be dependent on me to get places. In Chicago they had a sense of independence, they had a sense of their neighborhood. They had a sense of where they belonged. Here, they are in a car, they are watching out through the car window. All they can do is look at maps as we go places. They're the ones that have had the most difficult adjustment. In Chicago they were masters of their own schedule. They could go out, hang out in the sidewalk [and] have lots of incidental contact. Here there is none." . . .

School children, like other pedestrians, have suffered under the automobile-oriented development patterns of the last half century. They will be among the first beneficiaries of efforts to make our neighborhoods more walkable. As a result, they will be healthier and happier.