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Previous: Funding & Staffing

SHARING THE ROAD: SCHOOLS


It is estimated that parents driving their kids to school comprise 20-25 percent of morning rush hour traffic.
Credit: www.pedbikeimages.org / Dan Burden

Many of us remember walking or bicycling to school when we were children. As recently as 1969, 50 percent of children walked to school. By 1995, only 10 percent walked (1). Today, most children take the school bus or get a ride from parents.

Children face several obstacles to walking and bicycling to school, including safety concerns, lack of sidewalks and safe crossings, remote school locations, and lack of school support for bicycling and walking.
Success Stories

• Safe Routes to Schools (SRTS) is a growing international movement to encourage more children to walk and bicycle to school. SRTS typically engages schools, parents, law enforcement, municipalities and counties and other community members to address safety concerns and provide other types of support. U.S. Rep. James Oberstar from Minnesota has been a national champion for Safe Routes to Schools programs. Safe Routes programs usually include one or more of the traditional “three E’s” of traffic management and sometimes add a fourth, “empowerment”:
  1. Engineering—adding or improving infrastructure such as sidewalks, bicycle paths, street crossings and bicycle racks.
  2. Enforcement—increasing traffic enforcement and beefing up crossing guard programs.
  3. Education—teaching bicycle and pedestrian safety to children and raising awareness of traffic safety issues among adults.
  4. Empowerment—organizing supervised groups of children into Walking School Buses or Bicycle Trains and offering events, prizes and other incentives for children to walk and bicycle to school.

• Minnesota’s first pilot projects for SRTS began in 2002 in Saint Paul at St. Mark’s School and Randolph Heights Elementary. Teachers, parents, staff from Saint Paul Department of Public Works, law enforcement, and private corporations were involved in aspects of the program. After the first phase of the program, walking and biking to school at St. Mark’s increased by 52 percent, and car traffic near the school decreased by 23 percent (8). Biking and Walking Solutions is also changing driver behavior through a Traffic Busters pledge, in which adults agree to drive less often and more safely, and through a “wave, wait, and walk” pedestrian safety campaign.

• Smart Growth America in Washington, D.C., and 1000 Friends of Minnesota in Saint Paul are conducting research and advocacy on school siting and its effects on land use patterns, the environment and bicycling and walking. In California, the nonprofit organization New Schools/Better Neighborhoods fights for smaller, neighborhood-based schools (9), as does the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group in Chicago and the National Trust for Historic Preservation (10). In Michigan, the Michigan Land Use Institute and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce have teamed up to study the effects that school location decisions have on community development patterns (11).
A recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control showed that 40 percent of parents said traffic was a major barrier to allowing their children to walk to school (2). The National Safe Kids Campaign reviewed 9,000 “Walkability Audits” conducted across the country and found that nearly 60 percent of parents and children encountered at least one serious hazard along the route to school, including lack of sidewalks, unsafe intersections and heavy or speeding traffic (3).

Ironically, parents create most of the traffic near schools when they drop off and pick up their children (4). It is estimated that parents driving their children to school make up 20 to 25 percent of morning rush hour traffic (5).

Schools often fail to provide support for children to walk or bicycle to school-and some even discourage it. Walking routes often are not planned until well into the school year, school crossing guard programs are minimally supported, and there is little or no bicycle-or pedestrian-safety education in school curriculums.

California spends a large amount of its federal safety money on Safe Routes to Schools. Credit: www.pedbikeimages.org / Dan Burden

The remote location of many new schools can be a major barrier to children walking and biking to school. Minnesota Department of Education siting guidelines are one reason that school districts are building large mega-schools on the edges of development rather than in existing neighborhoods. Ironically, much of the required acreage is used for parking and recreation, the need for which increases as schools become accessible only by car or school bus.

Community-based schools declined and school busing increased after the 1950s, in part to comply with desegregation laws. In Minneapolis and Saint Paul, popular magnet schools have had a similar effect, with many children bypassing a neighborhood school in favor of one farther away-making it less likely that they can walk or bike to school. The Saint Paul school district spent more than $15 million in the 2002-2003 school year on busing (6). Nationally, school transportation costs have more than doubled in the past 30 years (7).

Recommendations

Support and fund Safe Routes to Schools programs for all Minnesota schools to encourage children to walk and bike to school. Support the rehabilitation and construction of neighborhood schools and discourage remotely located mega-schools.

  • School districts should provide safety education and planning for biking and walking to school on par with bus safety education. Walking and biking should be evaluated as cost-effective alternatives to increasing spending on bus transportation.
  • The Minnestota Department of Education should revise school siting guidelines to encourage community-based schools. The guidelines should provide reasonable acreages for new schools and encourage rehabilitation of older neighborhood schools whenever possible.
  • Municipalities and school districts should work together to better integrate new schools into communities to enable bicycling and walking to school.

 

 

 

 

Resources

 
Footnotes
1 National Safe Kids Campaign, Report to the Nation on Child Pedestrian Safety, October 2002. Accessed on 14 Dec. 2002 from www.safekids.org.
2 Surface Transportation Policy Project, Mean Streets 2002, Washington, D.C.: 2002, 17.
3 Ibid.
4 Laurie Blake, “Program in Saint Paul parochial school encourages students to walk, bike,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, Sunday, 12 May 2002.
5 U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “Safe Routes to Schools,” DOT HS 809-497: Sept. 2002, 73.
6 James Walsh, “School Board Weighs in on Bus Drivers,” Star Tribune, 7 May 2003.
7 Smart Growth America, “School Statistics,” accessed on 10 Feb. 2003 from http://www.smartgrowthamerica.com
8 Alice Tibbets, Biking and Walking Solutions, interview with S. Peterson 13 Nov. 2002.
9 David Abel, “New Schools/Better Neighborhoods,” accessed on 20 Jan. 2002 from http://www.planetizen.com/oped/cmt_item.php?id=46.
10 Jackie Leavy, “Building Community Schools,” accessed on 17 Jan. 2002 from http://www.planetizen.com/oped/cmt_item.php?id=464.
11 Hans Voss Institute, “State Chamber to Study School Location Decisions, Development Patterns,” accessed on 25 October 2002 from http://mlui.org/fullarticle.asp?fileid=16365.