Starting your own Program
Starting (or expanding) your own program is exciting and provides the opportunity to meet a lot of parents,
members of your community, and work with a wide variety of stakeholders. And it's fun!
1. Get People Involved
Identify neighborhood champions. These are individuals that provide leadership, and enough passion
and enthusiasm to give the program life. Every program should have at least one champion and they can be
teachers, principals, students, and parents. Typically they are parents that are avid bicyclists or walkers
that want a safer environment for their own children.
Form a safe routes to school team organized by the champions that consists of stakeholders such
as parents, students, and teachers. It is great if the team could get official school status. The team
can take the lead in gathering information about the school through surveys, traffic counts, organizing
events, and encouraging students to try biking and walking.
Form a community wide safe routes to school task force that shares a common geographic area in
order to be more successful and have a wider sphere of influence than just a team. To be an effective
task force, recruit school and local government staff, neighbors, and elected officials. Public safety
and health officials are also very helpful.
2. Steps to Success
Tips on how to plan and implement a Safe Routes program in your community:
- Sign up and take one of our Workshops
- Start Gathering Data
- Current biking & walking rates.
- Potential biking & walking rates.
- Physical barriers to safe or appealing trip.
- Preference or attitudinal barriers to trip.
- Bicycle and pedestrian crashes & injuries.
- Measure Bikeability and Walkability
- Take the trip with a child--decide together.
- Pick a route to a park, school, or friend's.
- Bring a checklist.
- Bring a map.
- Make a special note of problem areas.
- Score the rest of your community.
- Improve your bicycling skills
- Get your own Safe Routes Starter Toolkit
- Community Involvement and Sustainability
- Recruit stakeholders.
- Keep it fun.
- Don't make it time consuming.
- Work with the media.
- Promote as good for the entire community.
- Start Biking or Walking to School!
3. Resources
For additional forms, brochures, maps, and other useful documents, see our
Resources Page.
Key Factors for a Successful Program
There are four factors (the "Four Es") that are key to a successful SR2S to school program. These are well known to many health, safety, and transportation professionals. Here is a discussion of the Four Es and how they relate to a successful safe routes to school program:
Encouragement - Make biking and walking more attractive by holding special events such as parties, and sponsoring classroom activities and contests. Bike and walk to school days and clubs are popular. Beautify biking and walking routes. One way to do this is by adopting sidewalks and bike lanes/paths and picking up litter.
Education - Everyone that uses the roads, multi-use paths, and sidewalks could be educated about traffic laws and safe and courteous behavior on the road; paths, and sidewalks and about the health, environmental, and safety benefits of bicycling and walking. This could be done in several ways, including pilot projects, toolkits, newsletters and other promotional materials. Bike safety education is also popular with elementary school students. Education related to the impacts of transportation on the environment can also be integrated. For example, creating "No Idling" zones around schools can provide for cleaner air and serve as an example of the impacts of motor vehicles.
Enforcement - Enforce existing laws and pass new ones to make sure it is safe for children and adults to bicycle and walk. For example, enforce the law that requires motorists to yield to pedestrians at street corners or observe the speed limit in school zones. Communities do this with pedestrian sting operations. Media coverage helps spread the message including in those communities that don't have pedestrian sting operations.
Engineering - Build a better environment for biking and walking. This can be done by constructing or maintaining sidewalks and bike lanes; installing traffic signals or changing the design of streets through traffic-calming structures such as chicanes and bulb-outs. In some communities, local government and school staff, parents, and children work together to identify dangerous areas that are part of their routes to school.
They can then use this information to design and construct engineering improvements.
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