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National
Safe Routes to Schools Campaign Advances in United States With Congressional Funding, Added Technical Assistance to States and Localities
Launched 30 years ago in Denmark, where some 70 percent of students now walk or bike to school, the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) campaign is advancing in the U.S., with Congress allocating $612 million for state programs in FYs 2005-2009, and the Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based National Center for Safe Routes to School and the Bethesda, Maryland-based Active Living Resource Center (ALRC) expanding their educational, organizational and technical assistance to states and localities.
The National Center has just augmented its Web site with an e-mail sign-up link, and the ALRC published an online report on its landmark series of five SRTS pilot workshops in dense, diverse, low-income neighborhoods of Chicago, Illinois, Birmingham, Alabama, and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and administered by the National Center for Bicycling & Walking, the ALRC wanted to make sure, writes Director Sharon Roerty, that the distribution of SRTS resources, especially the federal money and related benefits, reach ''all of its intended targets, including the underserved.''
Noting that most local SRTS programs involve ''middle and upper middle class suburban communities,'' she cites the Federal Highway Administration's SRTS objective 2: Making the Program Accessible to Diverse Participants.
''State programs,'' the agency said, ''should be easily accessible to schools and communities in rural, suburban and urban setting, especially those with fewer local resources and limited ability to afford new incentives. This is particularly important, as school zones in low income areas often have higher-than-average child pedestrian crash rates, and have the greatest need for a SRTS program, yet may have limited resources to access these funds.''
Accordingly, Director Roerty writes, her staff began to work last year on ''a SRTS program for diverse population in heavily urbanized environments where schools are typically located in the middle of cities with row homes, multi-family dwellings and industrial neighbors.''
The main goal of the ensuing workshops in the three cities, she stresses, was ''to generate action: people working together to make it safer and more likely that students will walk or bike to school on a regular basis.'' 1/26/2007
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