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Safe Routes to School Regional Training

Wednesday, May 1, 2019
9:00 am - 2:30 pm

Walnut Hill Recreation Center
10011 Midway Road
Dallas, TX 75229

Registration now open!  Click here to be directed to the registration page.
$15 for lunch.

Join NCTCOG, community leaders, transportation professionals, planners, and school officials from across the region to learn about how to implement Safe Routes to School (SRTS) in your community.

Communities around the country are using Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs to make it safer and more appealing for children to walk and bicycle to school. SRTS programs grow from community’s concern about safety, health and traffic. SRTS is a proven way to get kids healthier and make communities safer and stronger.
 
This course provides participants with the knowledge and skills to develop sound SRTS programs based on community needs and conditions, best practices and responsible use of resources.
 
Overview of course agenda:

• Why SRTS matters: safety, health, and transportation issues
• Gathering information
• Engineering strategies
• Walk audit field exercise of school campus and surrounding area
• Developing a SRTS action plan
• Ways to prioritize schools and projects in your community or school district
• How to make SRTS happen: interagency relationships and next steps

Instructors (Toole Design):

• Diane Lambert, MPH, Senior Planner - Diane is recognized as one of the nation's foremost experts in school travel and SRTS. For over 10 years, Diane served as Lead Consultant with the National Center for SRTS, providing guidance and resources to state programs.
• Sean Corcoran, P.E., Senior Engineer - Sean leads the Toole Design team working on-site with the City of Austin's Active Transportation and Street Design Division on the design, planning, and implementation of multimodal projects.

 

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Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is a nationwide initiative focused on encouraging and enabling more children to safely walk and bicycle to school, thereby improving student health, traffic congestion, safety, and air quality around schools. NCTCOG supports SRTS with funding, planning and technical assistance, and educational materials. Interested in starting a SRTS initiative in your community? Check out our brochure for more information (also available in Spanish).

• The percentage of students that walk or bicycle to school has dropped from a national average of 48 percent in 1969 to just 9 percent in 2017.^1,2
• Vehicle trips to K-12 schools account for 10 to 14 percent of traffic during the morning commute.¹
• SRTS engineering, education, and encouragement interventions have been shown to decrease pedestrian injury rates by 44 percent, and increase walking and biking rates by 25 percent.^{3, 4}
• If 100 children at one school walked or bicycled instead of being driven every day for one school year, they would keep nearly 35,000 pounds of pollutants out of the air.⁵

Funding

NCTCOG periodically funds SRTS infrastructure projects, such as sidewalks and crosswalks, through Transportation Alternatives calls for projects. Under the 2017 call for projects, $12.2 million was awarded to 22 SRTS projects (click here for a list of funded SRTS projects). When completed, these improvements will provide better access to more than 30 elementary and middle schools across the region. Visit the Bicycle-Pedestrian Funding Opportunities page for more information.

Planning & Technical Assistance

NCTCOG has a history of helping local communities plan for SRTS. Below are just a few of the examples.

• Dallas – Ignacio Zaragoza Elementary Safe Routes to School Plan (2017)
• Kennedale – Delaney Elementary and Arthur Intermediate Safe Routes to School Plan (2017)
• Fort Worth – Applied Learning Academy Safe Routes to School Plan (2017)
• Fort Worth – Blue Zones City-wide Safe Routes to School Planning – Prioritization Criteria (2015)

Education

School Curriculum (free)
Go to LookOutTexans.org to download a free School Kit for teaching 3rd - 5th grades and 6th - 8th grades about pedestrian and bicycle safety. The School Kits were created with input from North Texas educators, and were designed to support the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards for physical and health education.

Additional parent and teacher resources:

Encouragement

Encouragement activities promote walking and bicycling to school to children, parents, and community members. Special events such as Walk to School Day  have proven effective in inspiring communities to embrace and value walking and bicycling to school. These events often result in the development of ongoing programs to encourage walking and bicycling, such as “walking school buses” and “bike trains,” and funding support for Safe Routes to School projects.

A walking school bus is a group of children walking to school with one or more adult. By providing adult supervision on the walk to and from school, walking school buses can help address the safety concerns of families who live within walking or bicycling distance to school. To see a walking school bus in action, check out the video by the Blue Zones Project - Fort Worth.

98 schools in the DFW region
registered events for Walk to School Day 2018