I’m going to start by being deliberatively provocative: "cities" may not matter nearly as much as we sometimes suggest. I surround the word with quotation marks, because I am talking about cities as municipalities with legal boundaries – which is not, by the way, how most people use the word. And that’s where we can get into trouble when it comes to policy.
Queen Creek, Arizona, is on the far southeastern fringe of metropolitan Phoenix. According to Google Maps, it’s 38 miles and about an hour to central Phoenix by the shortest route.
The land use pattern in and around Queen Creek consists of random enclaves of newly developed leapfrog sprawl, with equally random patches of irrigated agriculture to the north and east.
I gave a presentation about sustainable communities on October 6, which happened to be International Walk to School Day. In my talk, I mentioned that, in 1973, sixty percent of American kids walked to school; by 2006, that portion had dropped to a paltry 13 percent. I’ve written before about school sprawl and how the location and design of some schools seems explicitly designed to prevent or discourage access by foot or bicycle.
To counter this, the National Center for Safe Routes to School has sponsored a number of programs, including Walk to School Day (or, as some places called it, "Walk and Roll to School Day").