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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Following similar programs in Australia and Europe, SR2S got its start in the United States four years ago, when Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., persuaded the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to provide $50,000 grants for test projects in Marin County, Calif., and Arlington, Mass. Both programs posted significant increases in the numbers of kids who walked and biked to school, a result that helped propel the billion dollars into the highway and transit bill now making its way through Congress.
In lieu of federal funding, SR2S programs already exist in 26 states. The majority, like the newly minted program in Portland, Ore., are local efforts, although California set up a $20 million statewide SR2S program that has received over $240 million in project requests from local jurisdictions.
Wendi Kallins, project manager for the Marin County SR2S program, which has become a national model for the burgeoning movement, says parents routinely cite safety as the main reason they prevent their kids from walking or biking to school. But more often than not, parents' safety arguments are like falling down the rabbit hole; plunge deeper, and it gets curiouser and curiouser.
Fifty percent of the children hit by cars near schools are hit by vehicles driven by parents of other students, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Researchers for the Marin County program found that up to 30 percent of morning traffic is caused by parents driving their children to school. (These figures have since been validated in other parts of the country.) And as Dave Glowacz, the education director at the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, points out, driving to school has so thoroughly penetrated the K-8 consciousness that school "arrival" and "dismissal" times have been linguistically recast as "drop-off" and "pickup" hours.
In the SR2S vernacular, parental concerns about safety have as much to do with "stranger danger" -- the chance that a child walking to school will be snatched off the sidewalk by a complete stranger -- as a fear of traffic. In the United States, the actual incidence of stranger danger is decreasing; the number of kids kidnapped by strangers nationwide in 2002 was 115, down from 200 in 1988. "But when you're dealing with gut-level fears, there's not much you can do," Kallins said. "The whole level of fear in our culture is increasing." She describes one father who attended an SR2S meeting: "'With my pretty blue-eyed daughter,' he said, 'I'm convinced she will be the one.'"
Child-abduction terrors exploit the gap between perception and reality. They also reinforce a logical fallacy -- "I won't let my kids walk because it's not safe; it's not safe because there aren't enough people walking" -- that cuts straight to the heart of pedestrian and bike advocacy. In the late 1960s, 90 percent of children who lived within a mile of their school walked or biked. Today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 31 percent of such kids do so. Instead, working parents drive their kids two blocks to school to save time, then spend 5 to 10 minutes circling the building to find a safe place to drop them off -- a description that fits not only my neighbor across the street but also thousands of other parents across the country. Then there's the mother who smashed a kid in the face as she was opening the door of her SUV to drop off her own child.
"It's just mayhem," says Glowacz, who gathered data about kids in a northern Chicago suburban elementary school who were hit by cars while biking to school, only to discover that the only documented incidents occurred near school grounds during drop-off and pickup times.
Parents, of course, harbor legitimate reasons for not wanting their kids to walk to school. When the car is king, the simple act of crossing the street is fraught with risk, especially for children who are more inclined to be chatting with friends or blowing the fuzz off dandelions than paying attention to the steel-and-glass menace headed their way. New suburban schools are sited miles from students' homes, cash-strapped municipalities can barely pay for road paving, much less sidewalks and crosswalks, and cellphone-equipped SUVs are only getting bigger and more dangerous.
In the battle to make streets safer for pedestrians, bicyclists and children, activists have taken aim at federal transportation laws and state departments of transportation, which have historically focused on shoring up highway networks at the expense of local streets. The passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991 signaled a major break with this tradition by supporting local bike and pedestrian projects through two new programs: Enhancements, and Congestion and Air Quality Mitigation.
Federal SR2S legislation, Clark said, would "further the shift" away from state networks to local improvement projects, which invariably involve more innovative and flexible approaches to traffic problems. In suburban Marin County, for example, Kallins said identifying a champion in the schools who could organize parents, teachers, children and community members was "absolutely essential." With the assistance of a private traffic engineer, David Parisi, several cities in Marin County did implement SR2S engineering improvements, including enhancing school crosswalks, installing high-visibility signs, and modifying traffic-signal timing to assist pedestrian crossings.
The "encouragement" piece of the program, Kallins emphasized, was instrumental in increasing the numbers of kids who walked and biked to county schools. Promotional campaigns included frequent-rider contests sponsored by Trek -- the winner gets a bicycle -- adult-supervised walk-to-school programs such as Walking Wednesdays, and safety art, in which kids designed and posted signs around the school about the benefits of walking.
In February 2000, a survey of parents in Mill Valley showed that almost 70 percent of the students were driven to school. By the spring of 2002, walking to school rose from 21 percent to 38 percent -- an 80 percent increase in two years.
In New York City, where relatively large numbers of kids do walk to school, the focus of a citywide $2.5 million SR2S program will be engineering improvements to improve safety and to counteract a growing trend toward driving. City contractors are finishing up mappings of crashes around 1,350 neighborhood schools. ("We call them crashes, not accidents," noted Kit Hodge, campaign coordinator for Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit that inspired the city to adopt the SR2S program. "It's a philosophical difference.") By 2005, pedestrian improvements and traffic-calming measures are scheduled to be installed around the 135 most dangerous schools.
