The Last Child Walking to School

Since when was it reckless or dangerous for children to walk to school?

I’ve seen a lot of school construction projects where there is absolutely no way students could ever walk to school. Perhaps the most egregious of these is Huntington High School, serving Huntington, West Virginia. The prior Huntington High was situated on the edge of a residential neighborhood where many of the school students could walk to school. Then Huntington High and Huntington East High were consolidated into a new facility past the interstate (which was not permitted to go through town, rather it passes a few miles south of town) where few live and, even if they did, the situation of the school on top of a tall hill with a road traveling up to it lacking sidewalks hinders that opportunity.

Meanwhile, I was an elementary school student in the mid-1990s. I went to the same elementary school from grades one through seven. The school was about a half mile from my home. Every day I walked to and from school. For the first few years I walked with a babysitter and then as I grew older I either walked with friends or, gasp, by myself. I wouldn’t consider the neighborhood to be the best neighborhood, but it wasn’t a bad neighborhood either.

Walking to school taught me a number of things.

• Be careful around traffic. Look both ways before crossing the street.
• Wayfinding around and understanding who lived where in my neighborhood.
• Responsibility for myself: pay attention to my surroundings and act in a safe manner.

Your author in grade 3, no visible damage from playing in traffic

Building schools away from residential neighborhoods takes the opportunity for students to learn about navigating the world away from them (part of my theory why there are so many GPS-related gaffes), it removes an opportunity to be physically active, in many cases it increases the amount of time students spend neither at home nor in school, it has perpetual transportation costs that are almost always heavily subsidized by school districts, and I think it takes one more place for communities to come together away.

After reading Kids, Carpools, & Walking: How a Safety Mentality Creates Unsafe Spaces on streets.mn, I thankfully realized I’m not the only one with these concerns. Most dangerously I think we’re deferring the understanding of how to interact with traffic, public personal responsibility, and wayfinding until people are older and these concepts are less inherent.  At least, that’s my observation watching 17-year-old students at Pennsylvania’s flagship university step into traffic without so much as looking both ways. We’re also removing an opportunity for children to understand and get to know the environments they’re living in. The world is a far less scary place when you know who your neighbors are.

Hitting the Mon River Trail

I am an equal-opportunity lover of transportation. The modes that typically come to mind are road, rail, air, and marine, but there are two clear omissions from my point of view: feet and bicycles. In recent years, there has been a pronounced movement to convert abandoned and little-used railroads into trails, Rails to Trails. Former railroads make excellent walking and biking paths because they have gentler changes in elevation than roads intended for automobiles.

The Morgantown, West Virginia area has aggressively developed a number of rail trails through the Mon River Trails Conservancy, yielding a network that is not only great for recreation, but is also a component of the commutes of many and a window into the history of the region.

To celebrate the New Year, Chris and I decided to walk part of the Mon River Trail North to collect two geocaches (Vanvoorhis 94.7 and Silver Celebration) and explore part of the trail system that we had not yet had the opportunity to. Although just a few miles down the Monongahela River is the part of the trail system Chris uses every day to walk from where he parks his car to where his office is.

It was in the 60s and the trail was well-used by all sorts of people: bicyclists, young women walking their dogs, older women going for a walk, and geocachers like us! Even in small cities where people hole up in their homes, this thin strip of land between homes on the hillside and the river was alive with friendly faces of community.

As we made our way to the first cache, we found evidence of the prior use of this land. Some evidence was clear, such as a post indicating a wye. Other evidence was speculation, looking at the characteristics of a bridge over a creek and the grading of land next to the trail. But the hard work of the land and the river is not all in history. Old coal loading facilities are still loading coal onto barges to head toward Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River. If only we could see how this place looked before the trail, when the railroad was an artery in the heart of the region.

Approaching where there once was a wye

Trails offer a lot of benefits to individuals in urban and rural areas. Rail trails are a unique type of trail that yields more than just the benefits of getting outside, but a connection to an area. From there, your imagination is the limit of your enjoyment of the trail.

The Rails to Trails Conservancy has also powered a trail-finding search tool. If you're interested in finding a trail near you, access the tool here.