Ah, the 'burbs...

[weenie]

<p>I really liked this “My Turn” feature in Newsweek this week and thought maybe others here would enjoy it too.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12333788/site/newsweek/[/url]”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12333788/site/newsweek/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>

Sidewalks Can Make a Town a Neighborhood
We’ve forgotten the joy of roaming—and that driving our kids everywhere won’t keep them safe.
By Carolyn V. Egan
Newsweek</p>

<p>April 24, 2006 issue - According to my odometer, the grocery store is exactly 1.1 miles down the road from where I live in an emerging suburb that was a stretch of largely uninterrupted tobacco fields a mere 25 years ago. I walked this distance once in a spasm of self-recrimination, only to find my life at risk at every quirky bend along the route where cars are accustomed to their incautious rule.</p>

<p>My adventure yielded this startling revelation: I need a car to safely navigate my town, because—apart from a few new developments that sit like isolated cocoons—it lacks sidewalks. Most of us drive everywhere, no matter how near our destination. But in my childhood during the 1960s and '70s, the world was still accessible to pedestrians.</p>

<p>Some of my earliest memories are of me scurrying to keep pace with my mother as she pushed my sister in her baby carriage along the sidewalks across town. When I was older, I memorized every crack in the half mile of sidewalk linking my home to my grammar school. No school bus stopped traffic at every block to pick up children at their front doors. Nor did a parade of mothers wait in idling automobiles to cart their children home when the school bell sounded.</p>

<p>When I was little, the world was mine. I knew where the rainwater carved rivers in sand beds at the bottom of the hill before roiling to its final plunge down the storm drain. I knew the best street for a running slide in my winter boots. I knew the smell and look of spring as it quickened green upon the front lawns I passed. And I remember my heart quickening with it, in anticipation.</p>

<p>As I grew, I walked farther. I walked to and from more-distant schools. I walked to my first jobs, to my friends’ houses, to the movies. Sidewalks enabled these humming, skipping, thoughtful journeys, during which I came to know the corner stores, the old factory buildings, the smiling ladies hunched over their gardens along the meandering paths that twisted toward home. I knew the seasons of the geese that pierced the indigo sky and the seasons of the squirrels that clicked in solemn contest with hungry birds in gray branches. I knew which dogs would greet me and which would bark a warning; the cats that curled sweet tails around my legs; the mailmen who trudged—heads down—from house to house. All these things I knew and counted on.</p>

<p>I am told that nobody really cares about sidewalks; nobody wants to shovel them. Yet sidewalks—those evenly spaced concrete blocks—stitch a town into a neighborhood. They allow a physical experience of community while beckoning children to explore, to discover, to make friends three blocks away. For kids today, geography is understood from the back seat of a car, rather than through the scents and textures of heart-beating, muscle-flexing, self-motivated expeditions that connect one place to another, one person to another. The destination has displaced the journey.</p>

<p>Parents have become slaves to their children’s schedules, terrified to let their offspring out of sight. New houses are huge, enclosing all of life. They’re connected by technological portals to the outside world, making an abstraction of everything beyond their walls.</p>

<p>We worry about the safety of our children if we let them loose to wander sidewalks, even while we hear more and more stories of predators on the highways and byways of the Internet. We have forgotten that we cannot protect our children by telling them to hop in and buckle up. Our children do not develop the instincts to discern and avoid danger from the back seat of an automobile. We deprive them of self-mastery by insulating them from very cold and very hot temperatures, from rain, from wind. They do not know who they are without a plan, without a ride. While we encourage dependence in our children by chauffeuring them everywhere, we also encourage in them habits of selfishness and parochialism. Adult maturity is rooted in the unstructured roaming of childhood.</p>

<p>Sidewalks are becoming nostalgic artifacts of a time before three- or four-car families. To me, their absence represents disturbing changes in the way we connect to one another—and the habits, values and capacities we bequeath to our children.</p>

<p>It troubles me to wonder where the sidewalk really ends.</p>

<p>Egan lives in South Windsor, Conn.</p>

<p>© 2006 MSNBC.com

</p>

[emeraldkity4]

<p>For kids today, geography is understood from the back seat of a car
" Is that what I was supposed to learn back there?" ;)</p>

[EconMajor08]

<p>see, I don’t associate a lack of sidewalks with the suburbs, but rather with the exurbs…might just be where I’m from though. It is interesting to spend time with children who’ve always been driven everywhere, as opposed to those of us who learned through biking/walking. I wonder what happens as they come of age to drive or be otherwise independent, without that sense of geography that you learn more intimately by doing than by hitting your little brother as your mom drives you to soccer practice.</p>

[garland]

<p>We live in a walking community, and you’re right, Econ, it was a suburb when it was built a hundred years ago. but now most folks would call it the city. It seems that exurbs are the new suburbs.</p>

<p>I think walking/bking makes a huge difference in how you view your home environment. When I walk to work in the morning, I pass the same school kids on their way to school, neighbors walking dogs, the crossing guard, the mail carrier, etc. We walk to church, the library, the corner store, etc., and it definitely gives us a feel for who our neighbors are in a way that’s different from passing them behind windows. When my kids were little, the parents all walked their kids to school, then stood talking in the playground. These are some of the reasons we stayed in a place where there are a lot of perceived drawbacks (uneven schools, encroaching crime, tiny houses, etc) and they made it all worth it.</p>

[cathymee]

<p>When my older child was a second grader we moved from the “city” (a borough of NYC) to a pretty far away suburb on Long Island,in order to afford a house in a decent school district .In the “city”,we walked everywhere, including her elementary school.In that suburb,suddenly there were no sidewalks to walk on,and the kids actually took a bus to school!You had to drive to a pretty little waterfront village to have a sidewalk to walk on.
When this same child was entering 10th grade,we moved closer on the island towards the city to a better school district and newer house.The development had sidewalks (!) on one side of every street…but is gated,and theres nowhere to walk to outside of the development.Nevertheless,being a “citykid” I tried…taking the younger kid one time to buy a Halloween costume w/o a car.We tried to cross the 6 lane two way busy road,complete with turning lanes,that crosses with the two lane connecting road,with turning lanes.There were so many lanes of traffic going different ways you didnt know where to look first.And the cars don’t know to look for pedestrians,because nobody walks.I felt like we took our lives in our hands and havent repeated the experiment since.Its unfortunate.
I do look forward one day to living in a place where we can walk to get a newspaper,a container of milk or a cup of coffee.</p>

[m_amp_sdad]

<p>I am happy living in a medium sized city. Plenty to walk to including cafes, universities, museums and libraries. The city schools are integrated, so my daughter experienced many races and cultures. Also the city schools system is large enough to offer specialization by high school and the kids get a decent, well rounded education as long as the parents are engaged.</p>

[walkinghome]

<p>This struck a chord with me because last week when we were visiting Roanoke College I asked my son if he had gone into Salem - literally one block from campus. He said yes and that they had also gone into Roanoke. It wasn’t until we were driving out of Salem and towards Roanoke that he tells me that they didn’t walk into Salem, they drove through it. To him, that meant they saw it. I however, had walked three or four blocks (without him) of the main street, popped into a couple of stores and chatted with a couple of people in the library. Who do you think got a better feel for the town? </p>

<p>He navigated me into Roanoke and when we got to the downtown part he was all set to just drive out and hop back on the interstate - assuming again that by driving through it, we had “seen it”. I insisted on parking, meandering around and having a coffee at a neat coffee shop. It was weird though, because he just didn’t get how different it is seeing a place as you are driving by and experiencing it by walking around.</p>

<p>Lots of adults (and kids doing cross country) walk and run around here mostly in their neighborhoods, in town or at the local park. But it’s not really pedestrian or bike friendly because the roads are narrow, usually with ditches on the sides. We’ve lived here for almost 8 years and have never walked into town!</p>