First, just to be absolutely clear, it's not Garland. It's Saratoga Springs, New York. Officials, for safety concerns, have banned riding bicycles to school.
 
I've posted often about making neighborhoods more walkable and have posted on having bike routes. The modern suburb with its cul-de-sacs and arterial streets have divided cities so that the only way to access one area from another is by car. A number of studies have shown that obesity is greater in suburbs, especially those that are not walkable.
 
Tons of material exists about the need to return the human to the streets, either by walking or biking. In many cases with the way suburbs are designed, you just can't safely walk or bike. Now, if you even try to, a least one city has made the attempt illegal.
 
The Times Union reports that a 12-year-old and his mother are regularly breaking the law riding bikes four miles to middle school. Fortunately, it seems what is written isn't necessarily in stone and the policy is to be reconsidered.
 

From timesunion.com: School district could backpedal on policy By DENNIS YUSKO, Staff writer First published in print: Tuesday, September 29, 2009   SARATOGA SPRINGS -- Seventh-grader Adam Marino is getting a firsthand lesson in civil disobedience.   The 12-year-old and his mother, Janette Kaddo Marino, are defying Saratoga Springs school policy by biking to Maple Avenue Middle School on Route 9. The Jackson Street residents pedal more than four miles together each way to the middle school on nice days despite being told not to by school officials and police.   "I guess you can say that we continue to do what we feel is our right," Kaddo Marino said recently. "We feel strongly we have a right to get to school by a mode of transportation we deem appropriate."   Their methods may be unconventional, but the Marinos are part of a growing number of Americans challenging the sedentary habits of today's youths and what they view as overanxious "helicopter" parenting. As fewer children walk and bike to school nationwide, parents have started groups like the "Walking School Bus," which promotes physical activity and fitness in youth by having them walk to school with adults.   Read more: www.timesunion.com

Student Adam Marino, left, 12, rides his bike home from school Thursday afternoon Sept. 24, 2009, accompanied by his mother, Janette Kaddo Marino. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)

 
A good friend talks about "free range" kids, like he was as a child, and like I was as a matter of fact. He in the high desert of California and I in semi-arid West Texas; we had free reign to wander far and wide. I know for my friends and me, the mom's used a zone defense: if you were in their zone, they had full power to enforce mom law, even if it meant paddling half a dozen kids for some infraction. When the other mom's eventually heard about it, they'd say, "Thank you!" Then you had to hope your dad didn't find out or you'd get another "dose."
 
It was a much healthier life style (even the corporal punishment contributed to a healthier lifestyle and a stronger community, I hate to admit, still remembering).
 
Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (© 1961), discussed the uses of sidewalks in the first three chapters: safety, contact, and assimilating children. "When people say that a city, or part of it, is dangerous or is a jungle what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks.... The first thing to understand is that the public peace — the sidewalk and street peace — of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves."
 
"Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon.... Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental."
 
We have to do a lot to reverse some of the declines that have come from the way we (as a city and as a country) have developed our suburbs. If we make it illegal to ride a bike to school, it may be too late.