A Walk for the Children’s Safety

Monday morning, and the traffic is backed up as always at the public school down the block. Minivan, station wagon, Expedition, minivan, pickup, Suburban--no more than two kids per family car, please, and nothing less than curbside drop-offs will be accepted. Omygod, there’s Amber. Someone said her parents actually make her walk.

Such scary parents. Such scary police, also. The local cops have been out for a week now, ticketing double-parkers and no-stopping-zone lurkers in a vain attempt to persuade someone, anyone, to send their kids to school via some means other than fossil fuel. The citations flutter. The parents grit their teeth and pay up. Some things in Southern California are scarier than citations. Such as sending your child out to be . . . a pedestrian.

“An early morning walk,� Thoreau said, “is a blessing for the whole day.� This is all the proof you need that Thoreau didn’t grow up in Southern California at the end of this century. Here--according to a stack of transportation studies that seems to mount weekly--an early morning walk might just get you killed.

Especially if you’re a kid. Especially in the suburbs. Especially in those suburbs where lots of people have emigrated from the parts of the planet where people still walk. This translates, basically, as: every suburb in Southern California. The most recent report on the subject, issued last week by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, counted more than 1,100 child pedestrians killed or injured in Southern California in 1996. Picture enough cherubic faces to fill 55 classrooms. Picture the second leading cause of death in California for children aged 5-12.

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The problem with this picture is that it’s been virtually built into our way of life. It’s a cliche to whine about the way childhood has been reduced to either a TV set or the back of a parent’s head as everyone straps into the car for another “playdate.� But cliches aren’t cliches for nothing. The price of Southern California-style living--with its emphasis on private yards and private transit--has turned out to be inactive children and unsafe streets.

Between 20% and 25% of this state’s children, for example, are struggling with weight problems, in large measure because they don’t exercise. How could they? A generation ago, they might have walked to school or ridden a bike to a friend’s house. Now, even though crime is down, the sidewalks still feel scary, haunted by the guilty fears of a legion of working mothers: dope pushers and child snatchers and playground lurkers. Hard to feel good these days to let a child on foot or by bike explore his world unsupervised.

And then there’s Southern California’s taste in planning and zoning, with long, long blocks and wide, wide boulevards. You get tired just walking to the end of the cul-de-sac in some of these newer subdivisions. So more kids get driven, and the more everyone drives, the more traffic there is around the standard kid destinations. And the more traffic there is, the scarier it becomes to let a kid walk.

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The main response to this vicious cycle has been dull resignation. Witness the latest municipal trend toward crosswalk removal, under the rationale that crosswalks have come to give pedestrians a “false sense of security.� A Times report this summer out of Orange County found that it is now common practice in California for cities to simply raise the speed limit when speeders take over in a 35 mph neighborhood.

But, there have been stirrings, and lately they’ve gained momentum. Word has it that the same state health advocates who teed off on the cigarette industry this decade have decided that California’s couch-potato children should be their next priority. Meanwhile, the pedestrian safety message is being pushed in such disparate locales as Santa Ana, where a UC Irvine study found the highest pedestrian death rate in the region, and Santa Monica, where activists have been clamoring for crosswalks--successfully.

This week will shed a new spotlight on walking, as the state Department of Health Services and a coalition of nonprofits announce California’s second annual “Walk a Child to School Day� on Wednesday, Oct. 6. The idea is that, with enough walkers out there, consciousness will be raised for California’s next big push. So, with that in mind, a modest plug for a suburban back-to-school morning, here in these pages of worldwide scariness: Think Thoreau. Put down the car keys. Lace up those sneakers. Do your kid a favor. Take back the streets.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected]