Land Matters

Most kids aren’t walking to school anymore. Can landscape architects do anything to change that?

No one will be surprised, I suppose, to learn that only 15 percent of today’s kids walk or bike to school, compared to 60 percent who go by car and 25 percent who are bused. How can we hope to make a dent in nature-deficit disorder when we can’t even get kids to walk or bike through their own neighborhoods?

Granted, it’s more risky for today’s kids to walk than it was for me and my generation, and many parents don’t favor their kids walking. Some of the reasons have to do with the physical structure of the suburbs where most American families live. Many of the newer ’burbs don’t have sidewalks, and road crossings are wider and traffic faster than they used to be. Then there is the fear lodged at the back of every parent’s mind that his or her child could be snatched up by a predator.

Solutions do exist. One organization, Safe Routes to School (www.saferoutesinfo.org), has developed a structured program to show communities how to plan and build safe routes to school (or identify and map existing routes), encourage kids to travel in groups, and train them to avoid strangers. Federal transportation legislation devoted $612 million for the National Safe Routes to School Program from 2005 through 2009. With these institutions and incentives, what are landscape architects doing to implement Safe Routes to School and similar initiatives in school districts where walking is feasible?

“Feasible” is the key word here. As I learned when I attended a recent conference on smart growth, there is a more systemic reason that actually makes it impossible for many kids to walk to school—and it’s supported by our state governments. Most state boards of education mandate minimum acreages for schools—for example, 30 acres (plus one acre for every 100 students) for a typical high school to accommodate, among other things, the vast parking lots that a modern school is supposed to need. To site these vast campuses, school boards typically need to go searching for former farms or woodlands—far-flung sites that can only be reached by driving or busing. Few if any children could possibly reach them on foot. Meanwhile, older schools sited on one- or two-acre lots in walking distance of homes cannot satisfy the acreage formulas—and, in many cases, they are torn down. For a good primer on this sad state of affairs, see the National Trust study “Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School” at www.preservationnation.org/issues/historic-schools.

Instead of building far-flung schools that render walking difficult or impossible, wouldn’t it make more sense to modernize older schools in walking distance of neighborhoods? But can landscape architects do anything to help make that happen? Or—as it occurred to me while writing this—are landscape architects, hustling to make a living on the exurban fringes, more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution? Are they helping to site and lay out “sprawl schools” that kids couldn’t walk to if their educations depended on it?
J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA
Editor / bthompson@asla.org