I checked out the Walkability Score for my home and discovered—no surprise—it is a driver’s paradise. Living on a dangerous corner where our mailbox has been knocked down repeatedly by swerving cars with no sidewalks or bike paths made it predictable we’d rate: “Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!”
In my neighborhood, where there are no sidewalks or pathways along a busy highway, there is little incentive to walk or ride a bike.
My neighborhood isn’t very convenient for non-auto transportation. It’s a quarter-mile to the bus stop, right across the street from the closest place to buy food. It’s a mile to any real grocery store. Most importantly to me at the moment, it is two miles to campus. Of course, that is measured in a direct route I wouldn’t dream of taking since the dip into the valley on 10th Street near Smith is frequented by moving cars driving crazy and not expecting to see someone walking up the hill. And since Bloomington neighborhoods are designed to prevent through traffic, I have to go another mile out of my way to get around that treacherous bit of road.
One of my biggest parenting guilt trip involves a bike. I haven’t made much effort to teach Carter how to ride a bike. I was riding down my Dean Street neighborhood streets and sidewalks by age 4 on a 1950s Schwinn that my dad carefully painted blue and equipped with a bell. Carter is eight, and the few attempts we have made to lug the bikes across the street to a nearby church parking lot have been thwarted by a short attention span and undeveloped balance. More than my personal sense of comfort and safety, I regret our choice of locale in Bloomington because it has helped stymied my son’s chance to ride.
We’ll get past that, eventually, and he’ll learn to ride a bike. But it would be so much easier to lower my eco-footprint and connect my family with the larger community if we just had a safe way to get from here to there.
