By Hannah Younes, Leigh Ann von Hagen, Sean Meehan, and Robert B. Noland
Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is a national effort that aims to provide safer conditions for school travel and to encourage more walking and cycling. SRTS programs first started in the United States in the 1990s in a few cities and launched statewide in New Jersey in 2003. In 2005, Congress approved funding for implementation of Safe Routes to School programs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Since its inception, the national SRTS program has provided more than $1 billion in funding in all states to support infrastructure improvements and programming to make it safer and easier for children to walk and bicycle to and from school.
For as long as the SRTS program has been in place, the National Center for Safe Routes to School has recommended the use of student arrival and departure travel tallies or parent surveys before and after the implementation of a project to measure how students get to school. This data, in many instances, was both difficult to collect and often imprecise, leaving gaps in understanding projects’ impacts. Most schools did not measure the changes in travel activity before and after an SRTS infrastructure project was built. Furthermore, information on the mode of travel to and from school may not have captured the actual safety risks students encountered, such as exposure to high-speed traffic or wide intersections, which is crucial to assess the true effectiveness of these projects.
As the Safe Routes to School program has progressed, some of the fundamental approaches to transportation safety have shifted. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has acknowledged that changes are needed in how we think about traffic safety problems and the approaches needed to solve them, starting with a vision of eliminating deaths and serious injuries on the nation’s roads, often called zero death initiatives, and implemented using the Safe System Approach. The FHWA has adopted the Safe System Approach as the guiding paradigm to address roadway safety. This approach is based on six core principles: humans are vulnerable, humans make mistakes, safety is proactive, responsibility is shared, redundancy is crucial, and deaths and serious injuries are unacceptable. Safety projects, including those funded by SRTS, therefore need to address safety from more than one angle. Implementation of the Safe System Approach focuses on five primary objectives, including safer people, safer roads, and safer speeds. Projects aimed at reducing motor-vehicle speeds can lead to significant improvement in safety for all roadway users and can lead to more walking and biking to school. This is in line with the principles of the Safe System Approach as well as the goals of the SRTS program.
With the Safe System Approach in mind, we analyzed school zone infrastructure projects that received New Jersey SRTS federal funding in 2012 and 2014. The most common infrastructure project was sidewalk construction, which was present in 28 of the 48 (56%) projects. Among the 48 projects, five had implemented traffic calming measures to reduce vehicle speed. One of the five towns implemented a raised intersection with resurfaced sidewalks and curbs. This measure forces drivers to slow down in order to get over the hump at the intersection, improving safety for children walking and bicycling to school by reducing the likelihood of conflicts and the severity of potential collisions with motor vehicles.
Figure 1: Before (2012) and after (2018) imagery of raised intersection in a school zone
While sidewalks are essential infrastructure for pedestrians, we wanted to see whether they helped to reduce vehicle speeds in the absence of traffic calming measures. We used a project from a town in northern New Jersey as a case study and found that sidewalk implementation alone was not associated with reductions in speed at that location, and that the average vehicle speed was still 5-10 mph higher than the posted speed limit of 25 mph during school hours.
Figure 2: Google Street View of Roadway (facing north) before (2009) and after (2018) the construction of the sidewalk in a school zone
Adding sidewalks to the roadway has not addressed motor vehicle speeds along this roadway and does not improve street crossings. In a situation like this, parents who have the option to drive their children to school will likely continue to do so despite the availability of a sidewalk, simply because of the proximity of high-speed traffic on this county road. The presence of sidewalks has been documented to decrease pedestrian crash fatalities (Younes et al., 2023), but potentially higher traffic speeds may offset such benefits. Evidence from Great Britain, for instance, shows that sidewalks are often built to get pedestrians out of the street and enable faster vehicle flows (Ishaque & Noland, 2006). Therefore, if these projects do not address the speeds of motor vehicles, they do not adequately address safety issues and may not allay parents’ concerns enough for them to allow their children to walk or bike. These issues are particularly important for communities where students have no alternative but to walk or bicycle to school, such as in lower income and minority areas. People who live in these areas are more likely to die if involved in a crash (Raifman & Choma, 2022), partly because they are more likely to walk and bicycle along higher speed roads with fewer pedestrian facilities. Findings like this reinforce that ensuring projects reduce motor vehicle speeds is of paramount importance, especially in areas like school zones where vulnerable road users may be present.
Figure 3: Average speed of motor-vehicles along the school zone pictured in Figure 2, before and after sidewalk construction (Northbound and southbound) (RITIS)
School zone safety improvements should incorporate the Safe System Approach, meaning that vehicle speeds must be addressed. Infrastructure improvements, such as sidewalk additions, should be coupled with traffic calming measures in order to improve safety. Active traffic calming, such as medians, narrow travel lanes, bike lanes, and road diets, as well as passive traffic calming, such as radar feedback signs, should be used concurrently in order to provide pedestrians and bicyclists with the greatest safety benefits (“NJ School Zone Design Guide. Chapter 7: Traffic Calming,” 2014). Such measures are in line with Vision Zero initiatives that aim to eliminate, not merely reduce, traffic deaths and serious injuries (Ecola et al., 2018). Because speed is of such importance to safety, SRTS projects constructed in and around school zones should include elements that slow drivers down and their effectiveness should be evaluated through speed studies in addition to, if not instead of, travel tallies and parent surveys.
Acknowledgement:
Funding for this study was provided by the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) and with funding from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).
References:
Ecola, L., Popper, S., Silberglitt, R., & Fraade-Blanar, L. (2018). The Road to Zero: A Vision for Achieving Zero Roadway Deaths by 2050. R. Corporation. https://www.nsc.org/getmedia/485b0d61-e657-44e7-84f2-1a4206a7ea33/rtz-report.pdf.aspx
FHWA. (2020). RITIS: A PROBE-DATA SOURCE FOR ENHANCING OPERATIONS AND PLANNING CAPABILITIES. https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop20044/fhwahop20044.pdf
Ishaque, M. M., & Noland, R. B. (2006). Making roads safe for pedestrians or keeping them out of the way? An historical perspective on pedestrian policies in Britain. Journal of Transport History, 27(1), 115-137. https://doi.org/10.7227/tjth.27.1.8
NJ School Zone Design Guide. Chapter 7: Traffic Calming. (2014). In (pp. 56-72).
Raifman, M. A., & Choma, E. F. (2022). Disparities in Activity and Traffic Fatalities by Race/Ethnicity. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 63(2), 160-167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2022.03.012
RITIS. RITIS Introduction. CATT Lab. https://ritis.org/intro
Younes, H., Noland, R. B., Ann Von Hagen, L., & Meehan, S. (2023). Pedestrian- and bicyclist-involved crashes: Associations with spatial factors, pedestrian infrastructure, and equity impacts. Journal of Safety Research. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2023.05.005