A Louisville man was arrested today for making his 6-year-old daughter walk to school. WHAS 11 reported that the father was charged with endangering the welfare of a minor since the route to her elementary school was on a busy road with no sidewalks. The incident happened on a two-lane suburban street, but it’s the same with all sorts of streets in Louisville and other cities including Hurstbourne Lane pictured above. The girl was apparently walking to school because she missed the bus.
While it may not be the brightest idea to force your 6-year old child to walk down a suburban arterial street during the morning rush hour all alone, the underlying problem is that we have been designing neighborhoods where it’s unsafe for children to walk or play. We’re not defending this individual case, but condemning that children in Louisville literally can’t walk to school in many parts of the city.
The problem exists with the low-density, auto-dominated areas and the rigidly hierarchical road system that reinforces them. With speed limits of 35 or 45 miles per hour, much more than is required to kill a pedestrian, and no stops or obstacles for great stretches, the road is simply going to be unsafe. Many of these roads are just country lanes on steroids with too much traffic from over-development during the last century.
There’s usually no other way to walk from one point to another without using these dangerous roads, either. The subdivisions branching dendritically from the arterial spine don’t connect one place with another. They were designed that way to force all traffic onto designated streets and away from the residential street. More connections must be made to form a true sort of suburban grid, not only to provide safer routes for children and pedestrians, but to ease traffic congestion too (but that’s another topic). There are a number of ways to improve the safety of the street, but throwing down a strip of sidewalk isn’t necessarily going to fix the problem.
Even if there were sidewalks on these poorly designed suburban streets, there’s no guarantee of safety. Two months ago, on a similar street not too far from this incident, a crossing guard was killed by a pickup truck driver while helping a child cross the street right in front of a middle school. No charges were brought against the motorist (read more here). Whether there are sidewalks or not, the streets we have been building in the suburbs are just outright dangerous for children and just about anyone else who tries to walk along them.
The ability to perform basic tasks such as walking to school should be a qualifying factor for neighborhoods. We shouldn’t be praising the suburbs as we know them as a boon for children if they are trapped in their own backyard prison-fortresses until a motor vehicle comes to sweep them away to the outside world.
"Many of these roads are just country lanes on steroids with too much traffic from over-development during the last century." —That's certainly the truth! And very well put!
A few years ago my mom's car wouldn't start when she left Mall St. Matthews. She proceeded to walk to our house (right next to Ballard) and, to this day, claims it was one of the most treacherous 'hikes' she has ever made.
I do not have a car or license and I depend on my feet, my bike, or public transport to get me where I need to go. Such poor planning, (and with no initiatives to make it better) as shown above, is just one more way I see modern society trying to push people into the habit of use gas, drive, repeat.
Hopefully, instances such as this one will rub people in just the right way to get people involved in changing the situation.
WTF?! How does placing the childs father in jail alleviate the situation? Additionally this shows another serious problem we're facing in our community, lack of communication. Perhaps the school could have addressed the situation with the parents and while the father certainly sounds like a douche bag from the WHAS story, we can't be sure of all the details. No one wins when the cops are involved… or city planning when it comes to our streets apparently.
Great catch. This is clearly the new poster-child. I looked up the school she was headed for, and I believe she'd have to go through the interchange at I-265 and Bardstown Road. http://cartky.org/node/292
Of course, that road was 2 lanes when I went to school at Bates…but they should have built sidewalks when they rebuilt the road.