From 2012
The United States government since 2005 has spent almost $1 billion to fund parents to walk their children home from school.
This is part of a program called “Safe Routes To School” which operates in all 50 states. The government has issued a “Safe Streets Toolkit.” It offers communities a comprehensive guide on how to organize and get their hands on their share of the loot — sorry, the federal funds that Make America Better.
This program is big, and it will get bigger. America must be re-made!
In order to encourage more children to walk and bike, parents need to trust that it’s both safe and convenient from a variety of perspectives. Traffic on neighborhood roads and streets is a large impediment to most children walking or biking to school.To create a safe route for every child, there should be ample room to walk and bike, preferably separated from traffic. Every major road crossing needs a safe and visible crosswalk and sometimes traffic controls and crossing guards.
Basically, you’re the problem, Lard-O. You don’t travel by bicycle
Adults should lead by example. In communities where the bicycle is more accepted and used extensively by adults for short trips, there will be higher levels of children bicycling to schools. For example, the City of Davis, California, has 30 miles of bike trails and 35 miles of continuous bike lanes, including 11 grade-separated intersections and special bicycle traffic signals; in Davis, bicycles are used for more than 20 percent of all transportation trips with hundreds of bicycles crowding the bike racks at the middle school.
Davis, California is the home of the University of California, Davis. It’s the “ag school” of the University of California system. The people who are employed by this program want all Americans to be like Davis.
Are there lots of federal employees who bike to work in Washington, D.C.? No. Do they plan to? No. But the ones who work inside this program want you to.
Maybe you’re wondering why the federal government has spent money on this program. For the same reason that Sir Edmund Hillary gave when asked why he climbed Mt. Everest: “Because it’s there.”
All that money, so little time!
In Wisconsin, a regional planning commission was awarded over $900,000 to assist schools that couldn’t figure out how to help children walk home. This would be a logical use of taxpayer money only if parents truly are inept. Unfortunately, the professionals in charge of educating their children likely are even more so. If this is truly the case, why not give these people a simple fact sheet with bullet points? Option A: Walk your children home. Option B: Have in-laws or grandparents walk children home. Option C: Alternate pick-up days with friends. If parents and educators don’t have enough common sense to reach such conclusions, $900,000 isn’t going to fix this.
This kind of negativism is why the federal government will have to spend another billion dollars — maybe more — over the next seven years. Negativism is not what America is all about. Spending a billion dollars to help school districts teach parents how to walk children home is what America is all about.
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Published on June 5, 2012. The original is here.
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