Marcy Mammay is zooming along in her red Chevrolet Venture littered with baseball bats, jump ropes, peanut shells and other debris of her chauffeuring life.

Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette After a trip to shop for school uniforms, Marcy Mammay arbitrates a dispute on where to have lunch between daughter Sarah, 15, and son, John John, 11. Click photo for larger image. More about taxi moms Graphic: Moms' driving 1995 vs. 2001 Four local moms on the go Marcy Mammay, North Side: With life on a roll, she's busy steering Pratha Browner, Churchill: This mom is driven to exhaustion Pam Marmarelli, South Fayette: One mom, many errands Heidi White, Mt. Lebanon: Motherhood puts woman in the driver's seat

Midway through a 41-mile haul, after stopping to pick out school uniforms and cheerleading shoes, Mammay suggests lunch at Chili's to her two kids in the back seat.

"No. Pizza Hut," yells her 11-year-old son, John John.

"No, gross," says 15-year-old Sarah, who lobbies for Bravo over John John's howls.

"We put the fun in dysfunctional family," quips Mammay, a North Side mother, before negotiating a minivan truce: They will go out for ice cream if John John compromises and behaves at Bravo.

Welcome to the high-mileage, high-chaos life of a mom taxi driver, a role that has changed the very nature of motherhood. For better or worse, the average mother of school-age children spent about 74 minutes a day driving in 2001, up from 67 minutes in 1995, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C. Single mothers are even harder on their odometers.

Even during the so-called summer "slow season," mothers like Mammay are always on the go, ferrying their kids to practices, games and on other errands.

"Mothers and fathers, but mostly mothers, are always jamming someone into the car," said Sandra Rosenbloom, professor of planning at the University of Arizona. "It puts tremendous stress on people. They tell their kids, 'Put on your shoes right now. Get into the car.' Kids only want to get into the car when you don't want them to. It's a very complicated life. There are a lot of cars running around because of the failure of [public] transportation."

Pratha Browner, a Penn Hills soccer mom, puts 600 to 1,000 miles on her Jeep Grand Cherokee each week for her job merchandising magazines in stores throughout Western Pennsylvania. This high-mileage job gives her the flexibility to drive another 200 to 300 miles a week chauffeuring her kids, day and night.

"I am in my car all the time," she said, matter-of-factly.

Why it's happening

In explaining the proliferation of "Mom Taxi Service," a nickname worn by some mothers on T-shirts, experts have no shortage of reasons: a lack of public transportation, suburban sprawl, the loss of neighborhood schools, fears about children playing unsupervised, intense sports schedules and the decline of extended families.

America, of course, is a car culture, and there are plenty of vehicles available for all that ferrying. In fact, the U.S. Department of Transportation says the average American household now has more cars than drivers.

It isn't dads who are shouldering the burden of most chauffeuring. Even though men tend to drive more miles than women, it is women who make most of the trips to shuttle others, according to the policy project's "High Mileage Moms" study. Mothers today spend more time driving than eating, said Michelle Ernst, an analyst and author of the study.

What the endless errands do to the quality of life is a matter of debate. Some say the trips in SUVs and minivans add to pollution and congestion and rob mothers of quality family time.

Taxi driver moms have less time for "everything from playing with children to simply getting a good night's sleep," says the report by the policy project, which advocates more sidewalks and rebuilding communities to make them more walkable.

"It is a huge burden on these women," Ernst said. "Their time is already stretched thin."

Others say driving is a modern fact of motherhood. Despite the daily mad dashes, the car is like a mobile dining room, creating bonding-on-the-go.

"When we are at home, everyone is doing separate things," Browner said. "But when we are in the car, we are bonding. We talk about everything. It keeps me aware of what they are up to."

Mammay hears some bickering between her two kids in the car. But the mother and her two children also have a lot of good conversations and fun.

That view is supported by a group that has an interest in the topic. Two-thirds of the parents surveyed for the Chrysler Group by Harris Interactive named the family vehicle as a convenient place to have meaningful conversations with their children about school, friends and values.

"Just as the dining room table used to be the main place to meet, because everyone is so active and overscheduled, the vehicle itself is [now] the meeting place," said Lauren Vidovich, Chrysler spokeswoman.

Ernst countered: "Most families would rather spend free time in the park, playing ball or having a nice meal than driving somewhere."

'I have a life somewhere'

Marie Glomb of Valencia would love to spend less time chauffeuring. She used to look pityingly at mothers rushing off in cars with their kids and think, "Look at those moms. They give up their whole lives for their kids. I won't be like that."

Turns out, the mother of four nondriving children, ranging in age from 12 to 22, is always taking someone somewhere. "I have a life somewhere," she joked. "I don't really mind it because they want to do it or they have to do it. But sometimes it can get irritating because it puts my life on the back burner."

Part of the stress of being a chauffeur mom is the logistics of coordinating all your kids' activities. Glomb color-codes her four children's schedules on an empty calendar, but says, "I am always screwing it up and putting things on the wrong date."

Pam Marmarelli, a South Fayette mother of two, is an organizational marvel. She is so busy that she often showers in the evenings after she selects her children's clothes and prepares their lunches. That means when morning comes, she can be out the door in a hurry. Marmarelli, who drives about 17,000 miles a year in her SUV, also keeps a spiral-ring notebook in her car to keep track of errands. "Whatever I need the next day, I pack it the night before."

Even the most organized minivan mom can get tripped up in the details.

Mammay didn't have time to dry her son's baseball uniform before a July game. So she held the shirt out the window with her left arm while she drove to the game with the right one. Her makeshift minivan dryer helped, but the shirt was still damp. "I told him to tuck in his shirt and deal with it," she said.

And feeding them nutritious food amid a punishing schedule of games and practices can be daunting.

"You feel like you never put decent food in their mouths," said Beth Willard, a Cranberry mother of two children in two sports each. "You either eat in the concession stand or go through the drive-thru. I have gone through the drive-thru with one kid, taken them to practice and picked up another kid and gone through the same drive-thru. The worker is just looking at you like, 'Why are you back here again?' "

When mom is doing errands, the kids are often in the car with her. Children from newborns to age 5 spend an average of 64 minutes in the car on days they travel, according to the 2001 National Household Travel Survey.

Modern fears fuel trend

Rosenbloom, of the University of Arizona, worries about the effects of "mobile day care," but she knows most women don't have the options they once did.

"People used to live in neighborhoods where they let their kids walk to school without worrying about them being hit by cars, being offered dope or being molested," she said. "They used to live in neighborhoods where there were women around not in the labor force and you could walk across the street and say, 'Can you watch Johnny while I run to the store?' ''

The suburbs were designed for car use after World War II -- a process that was accelerated when some automakers bought up train routes and let them deteriorate, said Rosalyn Baxandall, co-author of "Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened."

"They built the suburbs to keep the automobile industry going."

Baxandall, who rides a bike through New York City, says a growing number of taxi driver moms are tooling around city streets, too. "It is almost as difficult for urban mothers now. It is less safe. They want kids in activities. Kids can't just go to the park alone. There are magnet schools and they are farther away."

While some suburban women live in modern subdivisions that require them to drive virtually everywhere, others have chosen older suburban neighborhoods close to schools and parks so they won't have to live in their cars.

When Heidi White, 39, and her husband moved to Mt. Lebanon 12 years ago, they picked a house close to parks, schools and shops, in a neighborhood with sidewalks. They have four children, including 5-month-old Eliza. Walking keeps the family fit, helps cut down on the cost of gasoline and reduces pollution, all things White kept in mind when choosing her home.

She lives in a type of neighborhood that some planners are trying to re-create. Worried that car dependence is making Americans heavier and polluting the air, some planners are pushing the concept of New Urbanism, building communities with homes that are near shops, schools, the library and medical offices, with plenty of sidewalks and public transit.

"Typically, [New Urbanism] allows a family to give up a car," said Barry Long, a principal at Urban Design Associates in Pittsburgh, which has worked on such projects. It's a hot concept in the crowded Southeast, he says, but because Pittsburgh does not have vast suburban sprawl and hasn't experienced huge population growth, such development is not as popular here.

Walkable communities might sound good, but it won't help mothers like Mammay, who likes her Victorian house in Brighton Heights and her kids' private schools in the North Hills, even if they aren't in the same neighborhood. She gladly will endure the trade-off of hours in her minivan.

"If I didn't have a car, I would have to rely on public transit. You would have to wait and it wouldn't be cost-efficient. That would put even more pressure on you."