Safe Routes to School

I spent the day yesterday attending a workshop on Safe Routes to School (SR2S), sponsored by the Westchester County Department of Transportation.



It is hard to believe that a workshop like this is the second only workshop in the nation, according to the consultant.

I started to believe it when I got a better sense of how they approached the problem. Safe Routes to School is about making school sites more walkable, improving environmental and health problems, and increasing positive sociability among children. To me, it obviously fits into a broader scheme of making a town walkable - it's a no-brainer. But that wasn't the issue.

For those people who are caught up in the daily run of getting their kids to school and then starting their day, the school is the end-all. The focus of this particular SR2S program was mostly on education, by teachers and parents, to the kids. There were numerous incentive programs that didn't involve much more than extra hours on the teacher's part, but by focusing only on a school site, the town misses significant opportunities to first, potential solutions, and second, to improving the town's general sense of walkability.

Never mind that the school was surrounded by ball fields, which were immediately adjacent to residential side streets (i.e. safe from speeding traffic) and was located in the center of town. Merchants were absent from this discussion of improving the town's sidewalks. The parents and school administrators were strictly focused on where the parents could drop off without endangering their kids, causing congestion, and impeding their own mobility.

But say you extend the area of what is considered the school campus to the outer edge of the ball field and to a couple more residential streets over, there suddenly are so many more places to drop kids off, and so many more ways to get them to walk. More than 50% of the kids already walked to school - in fact, most of the town is within a 1/2 mile square. There is no stigma to walking and within such a small area, there is literally no reason to drive unless you were driving out of the town.

Focusing on the streets and intersections immediately to the school only narrows possibilities. Parents think that if they fix only the places where there have been accidents, their kids will be safe. It's a common error I guess, but if they look at the whole place, they would realize that their school has so much more potential to fulfill their needs than they now can see.

There's a lot of great information on SR2S right now, and many good funding sources:

Walk to School
Oregon's Walk and Bike Program
National Center for Biking and Walking
Center for Disease Control