Enforcement & safety management

Introduction

In summer 2006, the Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Board of Missoula, Mont., engaged school and community organizations in the creation of a city-wide Safe Routes to School (SRTS) steering group with the goal of increasing the number of students that walked or bicycled to school and the awareness of the benefits of walking and bicycling to school.

Introduction

Evergreen Elementary School and Evergreen Middle School are in Flathead County, MT. The elementary school is on a busy, five-lane roadway at the county’s urban and rural interface. Currently, almost 25 percent of students walk to the two schools, even though there are no sidewalks on East Evergreen Drive, the street in front of the schools.

Introduction

The Montana Nutrition and Physical Activity Program (MT NAPA) at Montana State University in Bozeman, in collaboration with the local Safe Routes to School (SRTS) Task Force, initiated a SRTS pilot program at the Emily Dickinson Elementary School in the hopes that the school’s success would lead to the implementation of SRTS activities at all of the six elementary schools in the city.

Introduction

“Go Play” has new meaning in Billings, Montana. In 2004, the city with a population of 100,000 and with 23 elementary schools had been designated the least safe city for pedestrians in Montana by the Mean Streets Surface Transportation Policy Project.

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

Following a five-year plan has helped the city of Amory and its school district take steps to make neighborhoods safer for children to walk and bicycle to school. Amory, a small, rural community, has a population of 7,500, and its two elementary schools and middle school are all within a two-mile range of each other. Families feel safe in Amory.

 “Kids get on their bikes and ride all across town,” says Carol Rogers, Coordinator for School Health and grant writer for the school district.

Introduction

Liberty, MO, is a small historic community with a population of less than 30,000 people. All nine of the elementary schools in Liberty are in neighborhoods where most of the students live within walking distance to school. Unfortunately, a lack of infrastructure discourages many parents from allowing their children to walk or bicycle to school.

Introduction

The Mid-America Regional Council (MARC), a regional planning organization for Greater Kansas City, is training people to become “Safety Ambassadors” in an effort to provide consistency in the pedestrian and bicycle safety messages that children are learning. “This has been a very well-received effort,” said Aaron Bartlett, BikePed and Safety Programs Manager for MARC.

Introduction

When the PedNet Coalition in Columbia, MO organized daily Walking School Buses at West Boulevard Elementary School in fall 2006, only fifteen of the nearly 300 kindergarten through fifth grade students participated regularly.

Since then, the participation rate has grown to 65 students.