Safe routes to school make active transportation more accessible to all

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is an international movement to make it safer for students to walk, bike or roll to school. SRTS can focus on transportation projects, an element within a larger transportation project, or an urban design. With the growing interest in active mode transportation, planners need to rethink how they design communities for the movement of people.

This cultural shift presents an opportunity for multiple stakeholders (municipalities, school districts, local police, health units, etc.) to collaborate to impact all residents. A Hazard Assessment study can help communities better understand potential hazards and plan elements of the transportation network to keep students and pedestrians safe.

When evaluating the safety of the transportation network, it is crucial to conduct a Hazard Study with the children's perspective in mind: surveyors assess both what the children encounter on their walking path and how they are seen from the driver's view. The Hazard Assessment methodology uses available data such as speed limits, traffic counts, and known hazards to identify and rank the severity of potential hazards. Typically, this is done in concurrence with a site visit to identify students' active travel routes most frequently used. To adequately design school spaces for active travel, we consider the availability of parking, school bus routes and arrival times, school bus loading and unloading zones and procedures and available space on site. It is essential to learn about student behaviour and gather information about catchment areas and walking distance standards, road characteristics and locations of sidewalk or pathway connections and crossing guards.

Once the hazards are defined, we develop the maps for route planning to consider the identified barriers to active school travel. Based on the information detailed in the maps, we can recommend several potential improvements to increase active school travel and develop a strategy for improving the active transportation needs from a pedestrian safety standpoint.

The recommendations, strategy and maps are shared with parents and the community in a stakeholder engagement session. The creation of educational materials for the community and the school population (students and parents) is paramount to successful uptake; this is usually supported by technical training for the police regarding targeted enforcement related to pedestrian safety.

This approach to designing safer routes directly impacts students across the community and dramatically improves the walking/cycling experience for the wider community. It provides all residents with a greater impetus to participate in active mode transportation, a major tenet when considering a community's 'lovability.'

In a community near Ottawa, ON - The Leeds, Grenville and Lanark District Health Unit wanted to increase the active school travel for the children in North Grenville. Our invested Project Manager sat on a committee with the police, the municipality, the health unit, the school principals, school boards and school transportation consortiums. It was a collaborative, committed approach that led to the project's success. All participants contributed to identifying hazards, reviewing the methodology for hazard rating and providing suggestions to improve pedestrian routes. A walking school bus program was started that followed the suggested walking routes proposed in this project.

The encouragement component of the 5 E's helps support the parent's decision to allow their children to walk to school. For this project, the walking route maps and the development of the walking school bus route prepared by GHD fulfilled the encouragement aspect.

At the close of the project, the Project Manager attended a community bike rodeo workshop to teach children about safely riding their bicycles to school and interacting with the pedestrians and vehicles on the roads.

In our next normal, where the classroom may or may not be in a brick-and-mortar building, what could planners and stakeholders be thinking about to make active transportation safer for all? Our built environment has traditionally been planned and built for cars, but demand is increasing for accommodation for multi-modal travel. Various methods can be applied to modify our existing roadway infrastructure to add value for cyclists and pedestrians. Adding cycling lanes or cycle tracks, providing wider sidewalks or multi-use paths and pedestrian crossing locations can all help to provide a travelling environment that caters to many different users. The challenge is finding the best fit for each community's needs that considers the existing neighbourhood characteristics and the particular elements of the travelled way and the public's needs. It is important to identify the deficiencies to uncover opportunities to add or improve walking and cycling routes.

How do you initiate a Hazard Assessment in your community? We can start with the assessments and then consider grants, partnerships, and other opportunities for funding the infrastructure.

About the author

Ms. Vanessa Skelton, a GHD Associate, is a project manager and the lead for the Transportation Planning and Traffic Engineering group in Canada. She is a professional engineer with GHD since 2018 and has over 25 years of experience in the transportation industry. As an avid cyclist and dog walker, Vanessa regularly travels the routes in her community, which provides a personal perspective on active travel. She completes safety studies and provides recommendations to municipalities for identified safety concerns. She manages design projects and traffic studies for many municipalities ranging from rural communities to large cities.