The city where I live has a law that bus service must be provided to HS students, if they live MORE than 1/4 mile from the school! This is stupid! Walking to school would be a great benefit to most of these kids…you have to see some of them to believe it…15 year old girls who weigh 200 pounds! I know it isn’t cool for teenagers to have to walk to school…but it would probably benefit them far more than providing salads in the cafetera!
The problem is that you can’t really force people into situations that will make them healthy. And if you do, it’ll only work for a short term.
It’s human nature to strive for convience. So even if there wasn’t bus service, kids would find an easier way to get to school. Walking a mile to school would burn about 100 calories, biking would burn about 30, getting a ride from a friend would be much less.
And although I think it’s great to get sodas out of school–no sense making useless calories so easy to get–that’s not a good long-term solution. You can’t keep someone at a healthy weight by making sure they don’t have access to junk foods. Eventually they’ll get into the real world where bad choices are easy to make. You see this in college where people gain the “freshman 15”.
Really, it’s up to the individual to realize they cannot eat a whole pizza everyday or even a whole box of granola at breakfast.
Where do you live, out of curiosity? I generally agree that 1/4 mile is ridiculous, BUT in some of the strip-mall infested sprawling suburbs of larger cities (let’s say, Chicago), walking 1/4 mile from school may involve crossing 6+ lane roads with lots of traffic going at fairly decent speeds. So it may not be so much the distance as the things that lie along that distance, especially in the winter.
My wife grew up in a town that had no streetlights, stoplights, or sidewalks, all of which can make walking to and from school more complicated.
Maybe true, maybe not.
An anecdotal example: my normal morning commute is about an hour door to door, consisting of 10 min. walking to the train, 30-40 minutes waiting for or riding the train, and another 10 min. walking from the train to work.
But because the train stops every half-mile or so, and because biking is faster than walking, and because Chicago has a bike path that runs along the lakefront, biking to work takes roughly the same amount of time as taking the train. I’ve done it occasionally, and I’m a decent endurance biker, but by no means a particularly fast one.
I’d do it more often, except that it’s a pain to have to shower on the other end in a hurry, and pack a change of clothes, and what if it rains? etc., plus Chicago has long and nasty winters, so it’s not a viable year-round option unless you have the constitution of a woolly mammoth (and really good brakes). And honestly, part of the reason is that at 6:30 a.m., I’m not terribly motivated to start off my day with an hour of strenuous excercise. But it’s a realistic option for lots of people who aren’t doing it, because driving or the bus are easier.