Safe Routes to School: A New Chapter

Safe Routes to School, by default, has a good press. Not many who'd come forward to advocate for unsafe routes, you would think. But looking at it more closely, cracks become visible: The program is unwieldy and hampered by bureaucratic overheads. Often the students (& parents) who start a program have long left the school when the new zebra crossing is finally on the ground. Be it state (SR2S) or federally (SRTS) funded, it requires partnerships between schools and municipalities which are unwieldy and can lead to a wrong emphasis on building streets, sidewalks, crossings, when the real safe routes to school would be built in the heads of drivers and students and teachers. Some cities are known to use the SRTS funds for their general upkeep of streets, other cities cannot spend the money because a hiring freeze make it impossible to spend those precious dollars.
A new solution  comes from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the Bay Area. With the help of the Bay Area Bicycle Coalition they have developed a regional Safe Routes to School program. This is a lean and mean operation, financed through Federal Congestion Management Air Quality (CMAQ) funding and focused on education and encouragement with flexibility to allow funding of facilities where needed. Without cement and asphalt, but with concepts and knowledge, routes for active transportation can be built more quickly, cheaper and more effectively that the geographic notion of a safe route seems to suggest,  which still dreams of cement and a sidewalks, and is a distant relative of the highway notion of the transportation universe: wedded to the notion that with a bit more cement you can always build your way out of any transportation impasse.
The Education Committee of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition  is now embarking on a campaign to engage the Regional Transportation Authority, or very own Metro, to implement and fund a similar program in our region. A letter to the members of the Metro board went out April 15. Please forward it in your own name to the Metro Board and get in touch if you can assist in this important effort. Perhaps you have a direct contact with one of the board members and can raise the proposal privately with them. Safe routes to school are not mind-games of the cement salesman, but an educational goal which teachers can deliver  just as quickly and effectively as they deliver spelling and multiplication and the rest of their precious load.