"Walking the Walk"
by National Building Museum curator Susan Piedmont-Palladino
We learn our habits early. The first time we do something it’s always a little awkward. Remember the first time you sat in the driver’s seat? But if you do something often enough and it becomes a habit, then even the most implausible activity can become the new normal. That’s how you became a chauffeur for your kids.
Only 40 years ago almost half of our children walked or biked to elementary school. Now, just 13% do. Half of the remaining 87% are driven to school in a car. In 1969, so few children were driven to school that you—if you were a kid then—probably remember who they were. Now the numbers have almost exactly reversed, but it happened so gradually that it was almost imperceptible. There’s one less child on the sidewalk, one more strapped in the car seat. This seemed to be the safer choice. And as the drop-off lane became more congested, it seemed even safer to be inside the car rather than outside. But those 13% still outside walking and biking may be in better health. They’re certainly developing better long-term healthy habits. Turning our kids into habitual passengers may keep them shielded from harm, but it has some unintended consequences. Nearly one in five elementary school kids is obese. Thirty years ago that number was only about one in 15. What will it take to turn the trend around and help our kids become habitual walkers and bikers?
We got ourselves into this mess by focusing on new physical infrastructure—smooth roads and brand new schools. The planning and policy decisions of the last 40 years, each based on seemingly rational and laudable intentions, have gradually constructed the very environment we feared in the first place: fast cars, uncrossable intersections, long distances, no familiar faces waving from nearby windows. A neighborhood used to be defined as the catchment area for a single elementary school. It’s not so much a set acreage as a social fabric. But we threw all of our resources into the physical infrastructure and forgot the social infrastructure. A sidewalk is more than a four inch thick, eight foot wide strip of concrete. For kids, it’s the space where we could play-act at independence. It’s where the distinctions between public and private space first begin to come into focus. Sidewalks, bike lanes, traffic-calmed streets aren’t just good for us physically, making us healthier and safer; they’re good for us socially as well.
Our infographic gives a snap shot as of 2009, but it doesn’t predict the future. There’s some good evidence that this generation of kids may not sit quietly strapped in the car seat until it’s their turn to drive. The U.S. Department of Transportation reported that between 1988 and 2008 the number of 16 year olds getting their driver’s licenses actually declined from 44.7% to 30.7%. Instead of counting the years to driverhood, more teens are giving it the “whatever... Now, some of them may be so happy being chauffeured they don’t see why they should have to do it themselves. But others, like the kids behind Kids vs. Global Warming, may have just decided to say “no thanks, I’ll walk.”
How many of your habits—and values—can you trace back to your childhood? What influences the decisions you make today? Is it what your neighbors and peers do? The lamest justification we ever gave our parents was “everyone else is doing it,” but that still figures in our adult decisions. In another forty years our kids will be the ones making the decisions. They’ll be the school board members, planning commissioners, landscape architects, and urban designers deciding the shape of our neighborhoods. What will they draw on to make good decisions? Peer pressure is a powerful force, but it works in both negative and positive ways. Biking and walking to school? All the cool kids are doing it.
