Compiled for California's Walk a Child to School Day

National Safe Routes To School Projects

Sustrans: Safe Routes To Schools Project
Sustrans, a national non-profit whose name is short for sustainable transportation, and local authorities are conducting a national demonstration project in the United Kingdom to show how children can be encouraged to cycle and walk to school. This involves traffic-free routes, traffic calming, bicycle security, environmental education and awareness building to create safe streets. The project, launched in 1995, is funded by the Environmental Action Fund of the Department of the Environment, charitable trusts and Sustrans' Supporters.

According to Sustrans, Safe Routes to School projects use routes that are currently used by the majority of pupils for their journey to school. Routes are likely to consist of a combination of traffic-calmed roads and traffic-free sections. Traffic calming is essential. Research by the Transport Research Laboratory shows that accidents involving children fall by an average of 67% in 20 mph zones. Measures that deter cars make routes safer and reduce the numbers of school escort trips. Pupils' and parents' fears and perceptions of hazards must be considered as well as actual accident statistics. Routes need to be continuous and direct; children, like adults, don't like having to go the long way ‘round. Routes are designed so that secondary and older primary school children are happy to travel unaccompanied by adults.

Contact: www.sustrans.org.uk /index.html

Active & Safe Routes to School
This project encourages Canadian students and their parents to choose active modes of getting to and from school such as walking, biking, or in-line skating. It also encourages (1) no-idling zones in front of schools to encourage waiting drivers to turn off their engines, making for cleaner air in the immediate school vicinity; (2) mapping exercises so that children can get to know their neighborhood better as well as the safest routes to walk; and (3) many other program ideas tailored to the specific needs of Canada's diverse school settings.

Chantal Laliberté, Go for Green's Active Transportation Manager, says that while the health and environmental benefits of walking to school are fairly obvious, parents may be surprised to learn that an Active & Safe Routes to School program can also lessen the chance of kids being involved in traffic accidents. "Experience in Denmark has shown that an Active and Safe Routes to School program can lead to an 85% reduction in accidents where child pedestrians and cyclists are involved."

Laliberté hopes the national program can increase awareness of the negative health and environmental effects of driving to school, the support for active modes of transportation, and the creation of improved community infrastructure to facilitate walking and cycling. She points out that appropriate physical infrastructure such as walking paths, sidewalks, and safe intersections can go a long way to lessen parental fears about traffic safety. The web site is available in English and French.

Contact: Go for Green
613 562-5336 fax: 613 562-5314
www.goforgreen.ca

A Sampling of Safe Routes Resources for California

The California Walk a Child to School Day Headquarters
Participate in this national event with support from a resource center that provides walkability checklists in five languages, posters, proclamations, press releases, and lots of ideas for local coordinators. (Nationally, Walk a Child to School Day is the first Wednesday in October.)
Contact: The Center for Health Training
2229 Lombard Street
San Francisco, CA 94123
toll-free: 877-4-Safe Rt
SafeRt@jba-cht.com

The California Attorney General's Crime and Violence Prevention Center (CVPC)
The CVPC provides training, technical assistance, multimedia resource development, legislative and research assistance to the public, other government agencies, schools, and community groups. Staff includes specialists who are experts in: safe schools; community oriented policing and problem solving; violence prevention; drug and alcohol abuse; domestic violence; neighborhood and personal safety, and other issues.
Contact: 1300 I Street
Sacramento, CA 95814
916 324-7863 fax 327-2384
www.caag.state.ca.us/cvpc

California Kids' Plates
Distributes injury prevention money from the Child Health and Safety Fund back to communities across the state in the form of grants. Safe Routes to Schools projects would tend to qualify for these grants. A strategic marketing campaign works to increase the sale of Kids' Plates license plates, which funds the grants.
Contact: California Center for Childhood Injury Prevention
6505 Alvarado Road, Suite 208
San Diego, CA 92120
619 594-3691 grant program: Tina Zenzola
916 457-5546 marketing: Stephen Hopcraft

A Sampling of National & International Safe Routes-Related Resources

America WALKS is a national coalition of local walking advocacy groups dedicated to promoting livable communities where people can walk. America WALKs provides a support network for local groups and individuals working with public officials, engineers and design professionals.
Contact: P.O. Box 29103
Portland, OR 97210
503 228-0289
www.americawalks.org

The Green Brick Road (GBR) is a non-profit group which began in 1990 and has grown to become a broad network of students and educators working for environmental change. GBR's goal is to help all environmental educators and students accomplish environmental change through education and action.
Contact: c/o 8 Dumas Court
Don Mills, Ontario Canada M3A 2N2
1-800-GREEN-38 fax: 416 537-7515
www.gbr.org/who.htm

The National Center for Bicycling and Walking is a national, not-for-profit organization working with people in communities to make America more bicycle friendly and walkable. The Center provides updates and resources for bicycle and pedestrian practitioners, related professionals, and citizen advocates.
Contact: 1506 21st Street, NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
202 463-6622 fax 463-6625
www.bikefed.org

National Crime Prevention Council
National Crime Prevention Council is a national non-profit organization whose mission is to help America prevent crime and build safer, stronger communities. You can explore their On-Line Resource Center for useful information about crime prevention, community building, comprehensive planning, and fun stuff for kids. The web site is also available in Spanish.
Contact: www.ncpc.org

National Safe Kids Campaign
Local campaigns spur community groups, elected officials, corporations, foundations, and government agencies to make injury prevention a top priority. Community empowerment and economic incentives are used to foster lasting change in products, policies, attitudes and behaviors to keep kids safe. The Campaign has developed support materials on traffic safety (and other) topics for local groups, including materials in Spanish.
Contact: 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 1000
Washington DC 20004-1707
202 662-0600 fax 662-4465
www.safekids.org/home

Partnership for a Walkable America
The Partnership for a Walkable America is an alliance of public and private organizations, and individuals who are committed to promoting the changes needed to make America more walkable. This site has a Walkable America Checklist on-line and gives suggestions on how to improve your community's score. The Partnership is the United States sponsor of Walk Our Children to School Day, held annually on the first Wednesday of October.
Contact: Harold Thompson
1121 Spring Lake Drive
Itasca, IL 60143-3201
630 285-1121 fax 285-1315
www.nsc.org/walkable.htm

Safe Communities is an injury prevention program currently in 600 locations nationally, and is organized around the principle that local communities are best able to identify their unique safety problems, prioritize those problems, and recruit the appropriate community resources to solve the problems. Local leaders receive resources and training. Safe Routes to School demonstration projects scheduled to begin April 2000 in California use this model and funding.
Contact: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Region IX
201 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
415 744-3089 fax 744-2532
www.nhtsa.dot.gov/safecommunities


READ! To Explore the Possibilities
Selected by Mark Fenton, Peggy da Silva & Anne Seeley

Beyond Sprawl: New Patterns of Growth to Fit the New California
Bank of America, CA Resources Agency, Greenbelt Alliance and the Low Income Housing Fund, 1994.
AIronically, unchecked sprawl has shifted from an engine of California's growth to a force that now threatens to inhibit growth and degrade the quality of our life. So begins a seminal report for non-planners, outlining how our fast-paced, convenience-at-all-costs lifestyles are not sustainable. And how we're quickly developing places that are both fundamentally inconvenient and economically unsupportable. This is a good place for a lay-person to start learning about land use planning.
Contact: Greenbelt Alliance
415 543-4291
www.rahul.net/gba

The Geography of Childhood.
Gary P. Nabham, and Stephen Trimble. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Two fathers--a conservation biologist and a photographer--write a series of essays about the view of wilderness from children's eyes. The authors note that small children have less need for large-scale wilderness than for a garden, street tree, gully or field to create a crucial tie to the natural world. Nabham and Trimble draw on their own experiences as children and parents, on the experiences of people in cities and suburbs, and on the rituals of indigenous people in rural settings.

The Great Outdoors: Restoring Children's Right to Play Outside.
Mary S. Rivkin. Washington, DC: National Ass’n for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), 1995.
Mary Rivkin has written a thorough book that discusses the philosophy of why children need the outdoors and what outdoors means in city and in rural areas. She describes the patterns of development and lifestyle that have deprived children of their right to play outdoors and offers suggestions on how to reclaim that right for them: through safe structures, conflict resolution on the playground, traffic-calmed streets and environmental education.

Home from Nowhere
James Howard Kunstler; Simon & Schuster, 1996.
This is a wonderful blueprint for an America in which our communities have meaning once again. They are safer, more inviting environments, encourage social interaction and pride of ownership, and perhaps most notably, they are far more walkable than the current mall'n'sprawl development rampant in this country. If you read one book on architecture and planning--and you should--this is the one.


A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson; Broadway Books, 1998.
An astonishingly funny account of an entirely under-prepared duo's attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail. Guaranteed to hook you in the first chapter. Bryson's social commentary is pithy and entertaining--and very disheartening, when the protagonists make their occasional forays for supplies into what passes for civilization, such as Gatlinburg and Waynesboro, VA. It drives home the point that our environment doesn't just discourage physical activity, it practically prohibits it.


Guidebooks and Reports

A Guidebook for Student Pedestrian Safety
Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), 1996.
School districts in the state of Washington are required to develop and distribute school walk routes for all elementary schools. This Guidebook is for school transportation directors, parents, teachers, and local public works officials who are developing these routes. The book (1) provides direction on how to develop and implement school walk routes; (2) explains procedures to identify pedestrian safety deficiencies along school walk routes and suggests remedial actions; and (3) recommends efficient procedures which school administrators can use to work with local public works agencies to remedy these deficiencies.
Contact: WSDOT Northwest Technology Transfer Center
Transportation Building, KF-10
Olympia, WA 98504

KidsWalk-to-School is a guide (pending publication) for community-based programs that promotes "walking school buses" – organized groups walking to and from school, for children with their neighborhood friends, accompanied by adults. The manual is designed to be adapted to meet each community's needs and includes sections on planning, implementing, and evaluating a local program. Release of this guidebook is scheduled for spring 2000.
Contact: National Center for Bicycling and Walking
1506 21st Street, NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
202 463-6622 fax 463-6625
www.bikefed.org

Mean Streets (1997); Mean Streets: Children at Risk (1998); Caught in the Crosswalk (1999)
Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP) & the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
It is a world engineered to specifications that classify the pedestrian as a traffic "flow interruption," ideally kept off the streets altogether. Set foot in this world and it can kill you, even if you do look both ways. After all, some 6,100 pedestrians die in traffic accidents each year in the United StatesCone automobile-related fatality out of sevenCand more than 110,000 are injured. These reports offer competing notions of nostalgia and of progress. The authors argue that America's streets once again ought to invite and protect the pedestrian. They make the case for investments in a range of measures that have made many communities safer places in which to travel, by foot, to school or shop or work. These reports make a reasoned plea to begin correcting decades of imbalanced spending policies, in order to save lives, prevent injury, and give local people greater say in making their neighborhoods more livable.
Contact: The Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP)
www.transact.org/

Physical Activity and Behavioral Medicine
James Sallis and Neville Owen, Sage Publications, 1999.
Don't bother with a comprehensive literature search on physical activity interventions and their effectivenessCSallis and Owen have done the work. The gist of their findings, of course: individually targeted behavioral change strategies are effective only as long as the intervention exists. Remove the intervention, and populations revert to their pre-intervention states. See their summary on pages 182-183 for all the encouragement you need that environmentally-based changes are the key to our success in permanently getting people moving.

Way To Go! is a step by step guide to developing and implementing a school trip reduction program in your school community. Included are model forms to help organize the project and communicate your plans to the school community, resources to educate your project team and school community about the environment, safety, and health reasons for reducing car use, etc.
Contact: Bernadette Kowey, Coordinator
3538 West 24th Avenue
Vancouver, B.C. Canada V6S IL4
604 732-1511 or 1-800-325-3636
fax 733-0711
www.waytogo.icbc.bc.ca


Catalogs and Products

Detour Publications
The voice of urban ecology from the world=s most livable city.
Contact: 761 Queen St, W., Suite 101
Toronto ON M6J 1G1 Canada
www.web.apc.org/~detour

The Reflectory offers a wide range of Reflectors for Photoelectric Controls, Industrial and Traffic Safety, Promotional Giveaways and Consumer Use for Visibility In The Dark! You can even imprint your logo on the reflectors. A portion of the proceeds for these products goes to the Partnership for a Walkable America.
Contact: 914 565-2037 fax 565-2451
www.safetyreflectors.com



If you have resources that should be on this list, please submit them to: SafeRt@jba-cht.com

Updated: November 24, 1999