Age Range: 5 to 12+
Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is a national initiative to provide daily opportunities for youth to learn about health and gain the level of activity needed to remain fit. It also improves pedestrian safety and builds a sense of community as more people take to the streets. The key aim is to encourage and enable children to safely walk and cycle to school through an approach combining encouragement, education, engineering, enforcement and evaluation:
Encouragement — host events and contests to entice students to try walking and biking
Education — teach students important safety skills and launch driver safety campaign
Engineering — create physical improvements to the infrastructure surrounding the school, reduce vehicle speeds and establish safer crosswalks and pathways
Enforcement — use local law enforcement to ensure that drivers obey traffic laws
Evaluation — monitor and document outcomes and trends through the collection of data, both before and after the intervention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state that the daily activity from walking or biking to school provides a child with numerous health benefits, including:
[A] fresh start for their minds; prevention or delay of the development of high blood pressure; improvement of strength, muscle mass, and decrease in body fat; improvement in endurance, balance, and flexibility; improvement of self-image; and an increased likelihood that they will lead more physically active lifestyles in adulthood.
Along with the above reasons, developing a SRTS program offers many other incentives to a municipality:
New Jersey SRTS
Federal aid for the Safe Routes to School program was apportioned in 2005 under the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users Act (SAFETEA-LU). The SRTS program will be funded through Federal highway aid appropriated to state departments of transportation over five federal fiscal years (FY2005-2009). These funds are available for infrastructure and non-infrastructure projects, and to administer state SRTS programs that benefit elementary and middle school children in grades K–8.
New Jersey has been developing a statewide SRTS program which has several notable target goals:
The following cases illustrate how two communities were able to successfully develop a SRTS program. It is hoped that their experiences will inform and inspire New Jersey communities wishing to undertake a SRTS project.
