Stay Alert for Youthful Users of the Street All Year Long

Harmar Elementary School
in Harmer, Ohio

I promised a guest writer today, an expert on road diets.  Unfortunately, he’s still hard at work on his post, so you’re instead stuck with me.  The road diet post, or hopefully two, will run next week.

But it’s okay that today’s authorship reverted to me because I have a topic about which I want to vent.

Most schools in my town reopened last week.  And, as seems to happen every year, many wrote warnings to drivers about being aware of children on their way to school.

Obviously, I’ll fully in support of not running over students.  But isn’t the warning mistimed?

I can’t speak to everyone’s youth, but let me share a fairly typical day from the summer between my sixth and seventh grade school years.

After a slow start to the day, usually cereal while watching morning reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, I’d join a group of boys near the north end of my block for games played in the street and involving bat and ball.  We never had enough bodies for a full game of baseball, plus we had a grouchy neighbor who complained if we got too noisy, but we have a variety of alternatives with which to entertain ourselves until the early afternoon.

As the day got warmer, I’d often ride my bicycle to the nearby pool club, where I’d spend an hour or two hanging out and getting wet.

In the evening, after dinner, I’d sometimes join a different group of youths on the south end of my block for more street play, often a variant of softball that wasn’t high level, but was enough to keep me outside until the streetlights came on.

Now, compare that to my routine when school resumed.  Walk sleepily and sullenly to the corner to await a school bus.  Reverse in the afternoon, perhaps with less sleepiness.

Wouldn’t it have been ridiculous to warn drivers to be alert to my twice daily half-block walks during the school year while letting me play ball in the street and wander all over my neighborhood, on foot and on bicycle, all summer long with nary a warning to drivers?

Some will note that there are fewer children out and about on their own these days, with streetball games almost never seen.  They’re right on both points, which is a separate subject worthy of its own discussion, but I’ll also note that walking and bicycling to school are at historic lows, with many more students getting rides to school.

I know this will be only one data point, but I think it’s a good one.  My wife and I live on a moderately busy street.  Our home is nearly equidistant and within walking distance of three schools, a high school, junior high, and elementary school.  And we see more youths walking and bicycling during the summer than we do when school is in session.

The first day of school warnings are a clichéd remnant of a time that never was.  They’re not a bad thing, but the more useful reminder is to be aware of all street users on foot and on bicycle year round.

Okay, grumble complete.

However, the grumble had the upside of broaching the fact that fewer children are using the streets on their own these days, a problem that many describe as the loss of free-range childhoods.  It’s the topic that’s important to urbanism and into which I’ll dig next time, while still awaiting the road diet posts.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Assigning the Traffic Costs for Alternative Schooling Choices

I know a young couple with two young sons who moved to the North Bay a few years back.  Coming from a snowy clime, they were excited by the walkability opportunities in the more clement North Bay, particularly the possibility of the older son walking to school.  So when they looked for a home, being within walkable distance of a good school was near the top of their list.

They soon found a home they liked, a little less than a half-mile from a well-regarded school.  The walk would be through a safe neighborhood and would pass by a park offering the possibility of post-school play.  The fit seemed fine.  They moved in, eager to begin their new lives.

As the new school year approached, they tried to register the son at the school.  For the first time, they learned that the school was designated a magnet school and that not all students, even those within walkable distance, were accepted for enrollment.  They were told that children from within the neighborhood were given preference, but that individual decisions were made about every student.

Even more confounding, the administrators who would make the decision about this young man were on vacation and wouldn’t return until shortly before the start of school.

With 24 hours to go before the school year started, the first day clothes were laid out and ready to be donned, the young man was eager to begin his new educational adventure, and the parents still didn’t know whether they could walk him to school the following morning or if the next day would be the first day of a year-long routine of driving him to and from a more distant school.

I’m not an educational expert.  Personally, I did fine with attending the schools nearest to the homes in which I grew up.  But I remember sharing classrooms with students who, in retrospect, might have fared better under alternative schooling approaches.  So I won’t suggest that the proliferation of magnet and charter schools is a bad idea.

But I will suggest that encouraging that proliferation without accounting for the resulting traffic is an unacceptable oversight.  Admittedly, it’s an oversight that is typical of much American thought about traffic, but it’s an oversight regardless.

To be fair, I’ll acknowledge that I often received rides to school when I was a student.  Playing the baritone horn led to that result.  But from first grade through high school, my total days of walking, biking, or riding the bus far outnumbered the parental rides.  Too few students can make the same statement today.

I remember the first time I became aware of the growing trend of parental rides to schools.  I was working with the Facilities Manager for the school district in a small Oregon town.  We were scoping site improvements at an existing elementary school.

The Facilities Manager noted the need for a separate bus route to the school, a route that would leave the public street nearly a block away and wind past the playground.  I was puzzled by the idea.  He suggested that I visit the site at the end of the school day.  I did.  He was right.  Cars were backed up a block away, with buses stuck in their midst, busting bus schedules for the entire district.  I was shocked.  It was a scene I’d never seen in my youth.

And, because the school wasn’t sited in a particularly walkable setting, many of the parents were likely from within the boundaries for the school.  The traffic problem is only exacerbated when the parents begin using arterials and freeways to reach alternative schools.

What is the cost of these miles?  In my last post, I suggested that a vehicle mileage tax (VMT) of ten cents per mile and a gas cost of $10 per gallon were first cuts at the charges that would accurately move the costs of driving from governmental general funds to the drivers.  If we assume a three-mile drive each way twice per day to an alternative school, the annual cost of driving would about $1,000.

Today, the cost would be about $300 in gas costs only.  We do a fine job of reimbursing the oil companies for the gasoline they provide, but we’re leaving about $700 to picked up the general funds of local government (road wear and tear), state government (addressing climate change), and federal government (managing the geopolitical implications of a petroleum-dependent world).

There is an equity issue that raises its head in the middle of this train of thought.  If we begin assigning costs of $1,000 per year for attendance at alternative schools, aren’t affluent parents more capable of covering those costs, resulting in the children of affluent families being more effectively educated and thereby perpetuating income inequality?

It’s a legitimate concern that I share.  Even though I largely view the world from the perspective of land use, the issues of income inequality are still evident to me.  And I believe that a solution is required.

But the challenge to lower income parents to pay the accurate cost of transporting their children to alternative schools is a downstream effect of inequality.  Good solutions should address causes, not effects.  In a world where we charge per unit for water, milk, and electricity, to not charge for road usage and its impacts isn’t a cohesive strategy, it’s a scattershot.

Before closing, I should also make it clear that I’m not criticizing parents who have put their children into alternative schools.  Parents who have made the extra effort to find the right educational setting and resources for their child to succeed should be praised.  But if we don’t accurately assign the costs of those decisions then we perpetuate a distorted world in which flawed decisions follow. 

Instead, those parents should look for ways to deliver their children to school by bike, on foot, through transit, or in carpools.  Living in urban settings where those options are more available and where the routes are less likely to include arterials that are more dangerous to walkers and bike riders is also a good idea.

If you’re wondering about the young man about whom I began this post, he was accepted, at the last minute, into his neighborhood school.  He’s thriving there.  His parents are now focused on ensuring that his younger brother has the same walkable experience.

Having touched upon the vehicle mileage tax in my last two posts, I’ll dig a little deeper into a high-tech approach to VMTs in my next post.  It’s an idea that has remarkable upsides.  And scary downsides.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Riding a Virtual School Bus

After half a century, my memory may be fallible, but my recollection is that I walked to school, without parental accompaniment, for much of my first grade year.  My parents didn’t trust me to walk completely alone, so hooked me up with a third-grade girl who lived nearby.  Not only did I walk to school without a parent watching over me, but I did it with a cute third grader, an older woman.  It was a good school year.

Nor was the walk particularly short.  Both the house and the school still survive, although neither has aged well.  According to Google Maps, it’s 0.6 miles between the two.  And the route crosses an arterial that was busy even in 1959.  (A crossing guard may have been involved.)

I mention this because the world has changed a lot since my first grade year.

My wake-up call came in the early 1990s when the facilities manager for an Oregon school district sought my assistance in redesigning the traffic circulation at an elementary school.  His problem was that the queue of parents picking up children was interfering with school bus arrivals and departures.   I was astonished that many children received rides despite living closer than I had in my elementary school years, but site observations quickly confirmed the facility manager’s concern.

Today, I live in a neighborhood within a short walk of elementary, junior high, and high schools.  When my wife and I first moved in, we were shocked at how few students we saw on the streets.  In my subjective assessment, walking and bike-riding to the schools have increased since the initial observations.  But the traffic queues for all three schools are still long around the opening and closing bells.

There are a number of factors behind driving students to school becoming the default expectation, among them poorly located schools, the affluence to afford non-essential car trips, and largely overblown concerns about crime.  Sometimes the extent to which kids are driven to school results in absurd situations such as a father being arrested for trying to collect his kids on foot.

As an urbanist, the trend to drive children to school is distressing.  It robs our children of the chance to learn to navigate on foot and teaches them to fear the streets.  And ultimately it’s a trend that is unsustainable.

As an alternative, consider the virtual bus being used in a San Francisco neighborhood.  Acting like a bus without a motor, wheels, or seats, a group of school children with an adult as the “driver” follow a fixed route through a neighborhood, collecting “passengers” and delivering them to school.

In San Francisco, the concerns are truancy and tardiness, but the virtual bus approach could seemingly be applied to the safety concerns of other communities, while also providing morning exercise and social interaction.

I like the idea a lot.  Almost enough that I would have been willing to give up the one-on-one time with my third-grade girlfriend those many years ago.

Notes

Petaluma Urban Chat: After the big build-up to the meeting about City Repair Petaluma in November, it’s hard to believe that another month has passed.  But the monthly meeting of Urban Chat is scheduled for next Tuesday, December 10.

Returning to our regular meeting place and time, we’ll convene at 5:30 at the Aqus Cafe at 2nd and H Streets.  The discussion will begin at 5:45.

For the first time since early summer, we don’t have a speaker scheduled, so we’ll return to our study of “The Smart Growth Manual” by Duany, Speck, and Lydon.  All are welcome.  Even if you haven’t read the book, you should enjoy the discussion.

Holiday Season Blogging: As I noted several posts ago, this week is the beginning of year three of this blog.  Three posts per week for over a hundred weeks.  I still have many topics about which to write.  And I still enjoy the effort.  But the time to write and to polish, especially during the holiday season, can feel insufficient.  So I’m going to try something a little different over the next few weeks

In 2007, I spent two weeks in Venice, Italy, perhaps the most famous car-free city in the world.  During my time there, I took many, many photos and begin assembling my thoughts about being a stranger in a remarkable place.

Unfortunately, upon my return to the North Bay, real life intervened and I didn’t finish cataloguing my photos or writing my thoughts.  I’m now going to impose on your goodwill by doing those tasks here in my blog.

Every Friday post during December, and likely continuing into the New Year, will be my thoughts and photos about Venice, with a particular emphasis on the urbanism lessons to be learned.  My next post will cover trip planning and arrival.

I know that sharing vacation stories and photos is often among the more boorish behaviors possible.  But I’ll try to exceed that low expectation.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)