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 13 percent in 2009.¹
• 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

2019 SRTS Regional Training

More than 60 engineers, planners, local government and school district officials attended the SRTS Regional Training hosted by NCTCOG in May 2019, led by instructors from Toole Design. The presentations and handouts from the training can be downloaded by clicking on the links below.

• Why SRTS Matters
• Gathering Information and Engineering Strategies
• SRTS Plans and SRTS Project Prioritization
• How to Make SRTS Happen

• Agenda
• Field Exercise - Observation of a School
• How Communities Make SRTS Happen
• SRTS Web Resources
• ActiveTrans Priority Tool (ATP)

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 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 web 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 are available for download:

Tips for Modeling Safe Bicycling & Walking Behavior

School Zone Safety Tips (Click here to download the tips in Spanish)

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