A walkable city is a great city; where does Winchester stand?

I nev­er under­stood until I lived in Pittsburgh the old joke about grand­par­ents who walked to school uphill both ways.  Then, when I tried bik­ing to work, I under­stood: I biked up from the riv­er through Highland Park (and by the zoo, occa­sion­al­ly hear­ing the lions roar) on my way to work, and on my way home, I biked from the riv­er up Powers Run Road, usu­al­ly hav­ing to get off my bike and walk up the steep­est stretch.   Uphill both ways was actu­al­ly a per­fect­ly rea­son­able path in a hilly place. 

What I nev­er ques­tioned was the fact that my par­ents and grand­par­ents and I all walked to school.

There are many rea­sons why a stu­dent and their fam­i­ly might decide to use bus trans­porta­tion or a pri­vate vehi­cle to get to or from school.  I would argue that there is no ratio­nal, eth­i­cal, or pol­i­cy jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for a city mak­ing it func­tion­al­ly impos­si­ble to walk to or from school. 

This week, George Rogers Clark High School (GRC) faced far less of a chal­lenge in bussing stu­dents home than did, for exam­ple, Louisville.  We are a small city, and the dis­tance from cen­tral Winchester to the high school is about 3 miles – not a com­fort­able walk for most, but still less than the sev­er­al hours a bus can take to get home on a bad day.  Further, many stu­dents live close by, but along Old Boonesborough Road, with no shoul­der and no side­walk.  Virtually zero stu­dents can walk safe­ly to or from this well-built and expan­sive cam­pus, and no one in the com­mu­ni­ty can walk safe­ly to a foot­ball or soc­cer game on the weekends.

In 2016, Winchester passed an Active Transportation Plan, with the goal that future devel­op­ment of trans­porta­tion infra­struc­ture would pri­or­i­tize walk­a­bil­i­ty and bike safe­ty.  GRC was planned before that date, but no obvi­ous mod­i­fi­ca­tions were made to the cam­pus or the com­mu­ni­ty roads to make this cam­pus acces­si­ble.  Further, the expan­sion of Veterans Memorial Parkway was ini­tial­ly bid in 2014, so engi­neers and offi­cials have offered no mod­i­fi­ca­tions to make this still-imag­i­nary road accessible. 

The cri­te­ria for whether to add, say, a cross­walk include two non­sen­si­cal stan­dards: the amount of exist­ing walk­ing traf­fic and the num­ber of acci­dents.  These are the antithe­sis of proac­tive; we should seek to increase walk­ing traf­fic, and we should not need to wait for acci­dents, which will be fatal for pedes­tri­ans in so many cases. 

To be a great city – or even a great town to live in – we need the following:

1. A safe walk­ing and bik­ing path to GRC
2. Safe paths for walk­ing and bik­ing along and across any loop roads – Bypass Road and Veterans Memorial Parkway
3. Connecting paths among our major parks – Legacy Grove, Heritage Park, and College Park
4. A cross­walk across Lexington Avenue at Legacy Grove for the chil­dren and fam­i­lies in the neigh­bor­hoods south of Lexington Avenue
5. A bike­able path to the near­est city – Lexington – which could con­nect with the Brighton Trail there

What sto­ries will our chil­dren tell their grand­chil­dren about how they got to school?  Our com­mu­ni­ty needs to put more thought into writ­ing these sto­ries through our poli­cies and investments.