Lots of kids have quite a hike TO the bus in the first place.
Americans do need to walk more though, an average american walks VERY
little a day--just some basic excercise like that can do wonders for
your health!

YOU don't judge for everyone.

Many live near large quarries with steep hills and impassable places.

Get over your control problem.

Unfortunately, in those developments the grass is all private property
and as such the homeowners can (and probably would, if they don't want
their lawns being tramped on daily by tens to hundreds of kids) refuse to
allow kids to walk on it.

It's one thing to tell people to make healthy behavioral choices.  It's
another thing to provide the infrastructure that makes such choices
possible or practical (to use a non-health-related analogy: suppose a
family is experiencing excessively high housing and commuting costs.  
Either problem *individually* can be solved by behavioral choices: moving
to a cheaper neighborhood, or moving closer to work.  But it's quite
possible that moving to a cheaper neighborhood means moving farther from
work, and/or that moving closer to work means moving to a place where
housing costs are higher).

The notion that peoples lives can be determined solely by their will,
without any constraint from their environment (or their genetics) is an
American ideal, but reality doesn't always live up to ideals.  Most of
the problems with our built environment come from the fact that nobody
treats it as a system; instead it's treated as individual parts that
don't interact with each other.  For example, the decisions to close
local high schools and consolidate them into a smaller number of mega-
schools with large catchment areas were made based solely on the
economics of running schools; the effect of such decisions on kids'
physical activity levels wasn't within the school districts' purview.

Of course, there are some problems that are simply attitudinal.  There's
a background notion that in kids, there's some sort of Law of
Compensation between physical activity and academic achievment, with
sedentariness being seen as a virtue (possibly a hasty generalization
formed from observing ADHD kids); I've heard educators wishing that kids
would spend their recess time in the library rather than on the
playground.  Americans in general seem to view walking as something
beneath them; whenever I have passengers in my car, I always get razzed
for my habit of picking the first open parking space within reasonable
distance from the destination rather than spending several minutes
cruising the lot trying to find the closest space.  This aversion may
historically have been class-based, similar to historical attitudes
toward suntans (at one time, pale skin was a status symbol because it
meant you didn't have to work in the fields; come the Industrial
Revolution, a tan became a status symbol because it meant you weren't
stuck working in a dim factory and could afford leisure time in the sun,
and so on); it probably developed during a period when cars were
considered luxury goods.

Jeff made good points. He, like you, missed the tongue in cheek aspect
of the subject line.

Your posts to me in this thread are demonstrative of your obsession to
argue with me over anything I post.

Not where I live. Nor, in most communities. There just aren't enough police
officers who are not doing homeland security duty.

Who said, "in all places?" I said many kids. That is accurate.

I know. However, while walking to school is good when it  is an option, it
is not always an option. And, despite the fact that most school buses don't
have seat belts (except for the driver), school buses are the safest means
of transportation to school for kids who don't walk.

Jeff