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Safe Routes to School
Strategies
A variety of improvements can be implemented to create safer walking and cycling environments including improving roads and
sidewalks, enforcing speed limits, educating students and improving personal safety.
Successful Safe Routes to School programs in the United States usually includes one or more of these approaches: engineering, enforcement,
education, encouragement and evaluation.
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Engineering
An engineering approach creates operational and physical improvements to the infrastructure surrounding the school that reduce speeds
and conflicts with motor vehicles and establishes safer crosswalks and pathways.
Enforcement
The enforcement approach partners with local law enforcement to ensure that traffic laws (speeding, idling, cell phone,
yield-to-pedestrian) are obeyed in the vicinity of schools and initiating community enforcement, such as crossing guard programs.
Education
Education teaches children and parents about the broad range of transportation choices, instructing them in important lifelong
bicycling and walking safety skills and launching driver safety campaigns in the vicinity of schools.
Encouragement
An encouragement strategy promotes walking and bicycling to school on a regular basis through events and activities.
Adults walk with children in Maplewood.
(Images provided by Sharon Roerty)
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A temporary curbed island near a school in
Westfield, designed to ensure that traffic on the side street does not form two lanes and block the
views of pedestrians and school children.
(Image provided by Gordon Meth)
A speed monitor sign in Delanco.
(Image provided by Elise Brember-Nei)
School bike safety program in Wharton.
(Image provided by Patrick Franco)
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Evaluation
Monitoring the different strategies and documenting their outcomes and trends by collecting data before and after their intervention is a
critical part of determining the effectiveness of each strategy.
Integrated strategies
Although each strategy can stand alone, the most successful programs integrate elements from all of them.
One way to address all approaches is to develop a Safe Routes to School Action Plan for your school. A Safe Routes to School Action Plan
will addresses specific conditions within a municipality, district or school relevant to journeys to and from school. Action plans not
only address physical infrastructure needs such as sidewalks and roadway crossings, but also concerns about safety and health.
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