Safe Ways to School: The Role in Multimodal Planning

For the past three decades, the children in Florida and across the nation have experienced a decrease in routine daily physical activity as less and less children walk and bicycle to school. Parents choosing cars and buses over walking and bicycling has increased roadway traffic and negatively impacted the health of Florida's children. In response to this decrease and its related problems, such as increased school transportation costs, increase childhood obesity and diabetes, the federal and state government have passed recent legislation concerning multimodal planning, school siting, and the Safe Ways/Routes to School Program. The objective of this research is to determine how to implement this recent legislation in order to maximize the number of children walking and bicycling to school. Parents' decisions about how to safely get their children to school are complex and dependent upon the travel options available. Multimodal planning and coordinated school planning at the state and local level can provide these options by supplying a safe and predictable built environment in which the Safe Routes to School Program - education, encouragement, enforcement and engineering - can be implemented to increase the opportunities for children to engage in routine physical activity while walking to school. The most critical aspect of the Safe Routes to School Program is the need for ongoing coordination between these diverse programs. The goal of this coordination should be the development of communities that balance the need for safe, continuous, and predictable environments for pedestrians, bicyclists, especially near schools, with the need for mobility within the community. Without attention to the creation of multimodal environments that encourage alternatives to the automobile throughout the community, the traffic near school zones is likely to remain an issue and our children are likely to continue to experience the negative consequences of a lack of physical activity. With improved attention to multimodal transportation planning, coordinated school planning and Safe Routes to School programs we may be able to halt the decline in the number of children walking and bicycling to school.