Safe Routes To School
Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is an approach that promotes walking and bicycling to school through infrastructure improvements, enforcement, tools, safety education, and incentives to encourage walking and bicycling to school. Nationally, 10%–14% of car trips during morning rush hour are for school travel. SRTS initiatives improve safety and levels of physical activity for students.
Cities are for people.
For decades, cities have been planned almost exclusively around car travel, which has had a deeply corrosive effect on safety for other road users like pedestrians, cyclists, and disabled or elderly people. It’s time for us rethink road safety with quality of life for communities and neighbors as the guiding priority—putting the people who live in those communities over the people who commute through them.
The purpose of the program is to identify and mitigate barriers to active transportation through the five E’s—Evaluation, Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, and Engineering.
Evaluation
The first step in the program is to evaluate the school attendance area and walk boundaries to identify problem areas and strategies to solve them. A major evaluation takes place ahead of implementing a SRTS program and guides the development of strategies for the other four E’s.
Education
Once an SRTS plan has been developed, the next step is Education. This involves sharing the plan in different formats (written plans, live presentations, illustrations/maps/diagrams, etc.) or through different channels (community meetings, letters home to guardians, etc.). The goal is to get the entire community on board—not just the parents who have children at the school.
Encouragement
Safety plans can be boring, but getting to and from school safely doesn’t have to be. Using strategies like rewards/incentives, competition, WalkBus, BikeBus, children and members of the community can be encouraged to choose active transportation modes more frequently, resulting in health and safety benefits for the entire neighborhood.
Enforcement
Enforcement is an important consideration of an SRTS plan, and it’s a community-wide effort. Police have their role enforcing traffic laws particularly for speed and traffic control devices (stop signs, stop lights). School staff have an important role managing vehicle traffic coming onto and leaving the school property. And parents play a critical role in signaling the importance of safe walking, riding, and rolling habits for children traveling to and from school.
Engineering
When there are challenges that can’t be solved through Education or Enforcement, such as crossing heavy arterial traffic routes—Engineering can be the solution. Engineering refers to physical changes to the environment that contribute to improved safety. Some examples are enhanced crosswalks, flashing lights/speed feedback signs, pedestrian bridges over roadways, washes, or other barriers, and even the timing of traffic lights in the area.
