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As auto-dependent development has become the norm, we have seen an alarming downward trend in children independently walking and biking to school. A recent poll found that while 71 percent of adults walked or bicycled to school when they were young, only 18 percent of their children do so. The movement to create Safe Routes to School has focused in large part on helping children get back on their feet and on their bicycles in order to get more healthy exercise as part of their daily routine. This is important: the portion of children who are overweight or obese has quadrupled in the last 25 years.4 But creating safe streets may also have a fundamental impact on children's sense of well-being in their neighborhood and their connection to their community. Cognitive mapping exercises dramatically illustrate how children (and adults) perceive their environment, and how doing something as simple as building a pathway can change those perceptions. This article focuses on a cognitive mapping exercise conducted in schools in Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay Area. This exercise demonstrated how high traffic affects children's perceptions of their community and how making improvements can quickly change those perceptions and help children have a more positive view of their community. COGNITIVE MAPPING The practice of cognitive or image mapping originated in the field of psychology and was introduced to a broad audience of urban designers and planners by Kevin Lynch. Through his seminal work, The Image of the City, Lynch classified the physical, perceptible objects of an environment into five elements: Paths, Edges, Nodes, Districts, and Landmarks. Image mapping has been used by urban planners to help identify important destinations, preferred routes of travel, and barriers in a community. My father, Donald Appleyard, a student then faculty colleague of Lynch's, used mapping exercises to conduct a renowned study on the impacts of traffic on street and community livability. He did this by comparing three residential streets in San Francisco, similar in many respects, except for their traffic levels. Some of his major findings were that as traffic volumes increase, quality of life factors that lead to healthy and strong communities (e.g., social connections, size of home territory, neighborhood pride and property values) decrease. In adapting to these traffic impacts, residents would withdraw and retreat into the backs of their homes and away from the street and, consequently, their community. He also found that children and the elderly were particularly vulnerable to the negative affects of traffic exposure. Figure 1 (following page) graphically represents the inverse relationship between social ties (shown by the lines across the streets) and vehicular traffic, which increases from top to bottom. In the top street, where there is light vehicular traffic, there are many social connections and an active street-life. Whereas in the bottom street, the reverse can be seen with heavy traffic and fewer social ties. In sum, this image shows how community ties can actually be knit together by a street that is livable and inviting 3 NCBW Forum Article 3-7-05- March 2005