By Rachel Cotner
People are seven times more likely to actively commute as adults when they experience walking, biking, or using transit for transportation at a young age. The 2024 Safe Routes to School National Conference highlighted for over 400 attendees the importance of exposing our youth to life outside a car. The conference mascot was a duck. They are nature’s little walking school bus after all.
The Mayor of Fort Collins, Jeni Arndt, opened us up by highlighting the priorities of the city as light, power, water, then ensuring every route is a safe route to school. She invited us to experience Fort Collins, see what we can do better, and give feedback. I didn’t test out every route, but it was clear that moving people outside of cars was a priority.
Wes Marshall, author of Death by a Traffic Engineer, was the first keynote speaker. Make sure you hit up Island Press for a copy of his book (or a dozen to hand out to your City). Wes reminded us that we need to take data with a grain of salt. So often people walk away from crashes and don’t report them at all. Low dollar value crashes are less likely to be included in data, dooring crashes don’t usually even have a category because the car wasn’t moving. 311 has become more prevalent to request infrastructure improvements, but it’s much more likely to be utilized in wealthy white neighborhoods. They complain more, so they get more fixed. The New York State Court of Appeals found that municipalities can be held liable for their dangerous streets, but each new year Smart Growth America’s Dangerous By Design report shows us that isn’t happening.
Taking Us To School
Every session was packed with innovative ways that schools, municipalities, and organizations are leveraging their coalitions to create safer places for people to walk and roll. The connection between safe routes to school, safe routes for seniors, and safe routes for all was strong! We saw so many examples of quick build to permanent installations in places all over North America. The message behind these projects was to start small, that bigger isn’t always better, and that each new project is an advertisement good or bad that could lead to a surge of improved walking and rolling all over town.
Advocating for dedicated funding was another theme. Places that retained earmarked safe routes to school or alternative transportation funds were very likely to use those funds and expand the network space for nondrivers. It’s also vital to get to a point where vulnerable road users rank over cars. Sidewalk maintenance is expensive, but so is street maintenance, and we don’t hesitate for a moment to do that. Throughput by type of user should not be considered at all. “You can’t justify a bridge by the number of people swimming across a river.” – @brentToderian
When there is money available, don’t leave it to chance. Be prepared with good plans and project lists – an active modes plan, a pedestrian needs assessment, a school transportation assessment. Look for out of the box partners. Connect state DOT with State parks departments. The Lycra folks will always show up, but the parents of school age kids are the most diverse group you can bring to the table. Who delivers the message is KEY. It’s time to get smart. A 20 MPH citywide speed limit is almost a guarantee that granting organizations will take your city seriously when you reach outside for funding.
What About the Kids These Days
Does your city include youth in their planning process at all? Youth travel is integral to multimodal safe travel. When a new plan is written, you’re likely to see pictures of families and kids in the graphics, but how are children, youth or schools included in the plan’s design? Children have less experience navigating traffic and with navigating the errors that drivers make. Ignoring them in the design of our streets is a deadly mistake. Youth walk for different reasons, at different times of day, and in different ways than adults, and we lose that in aggregated data.
Speaking of data, many local colleges and universities have Geographic Information Systems (GIS) services waiting for your call. Connecting community problems with university students to help solve the problems can create innovative solutions to things that cities have been staring at for years. GIS can use census data and map data can help lay the groundwork for our stories. Sometimes, you can get a whole team of city officials to come on a walk and experience a place. More often, you will need to be able to tell the story more than once in a compelling way to people who will never see your infrastructure. In a grant application, for example. Using data alone isn’t always compelling, but combining data with storytelling can take someone to your place.
When Driving Is Not An Option
Powerhouse, Anna Zivarts, author of When Driving Is Not An Option, closed out the conference with her keynote presentation. America Walks recently hosted Anna for a webinar to speak on her new book (available at Island Press) and her experience as a low-vision parent moving around the world with her kid. This is another excellent book to hand over to any decision maker in your city! Anna created the Week Without Driving to encourage decision makers and elected officials to experience what 30% of the population do every day. In 2023, she brought it to America Walks to motivate a national audience to move through their places without driving.
Anna spoke on the non-binary nature of driving. Pretty much everyone is a nondriver at some point during their day even if that is the walk from the parking lot to the car. A power chair user could use a car that won’t allow their chair to fit. They can still drive, but may stay in the car until they return home. Some older adults don’t drive in the dark due to issues with headlights and night vision. Of transit riders, Black riders are 3x more likely to be nondrivers, and immigrant riders are 7x more likely to be nondrivers. Until they are old enough to drive, 100% of our youth are nondrivers. Even when they reach a legal age, many young people want to be able to get around without a car. Cars come with payments, taxes, insurance, maintenance and fuel costs, and they shouldn’t be a prerequisite to the freedom to move. As a society, we discount the mobility of kids because it’s a temporary status, but so many seniors are invisible because they can’t leave their homes.
It’s time to own the fact that our bike and walk organizations could do a better job of working with people outside of the usual advocacy circles. Go and get involved with disability communities, with immigrant communities, and with youth and senior communities. We all benefit from less cars, and from less fast cars, but creating a protected bike lane with no consideration for how other people may move through the space is asking for one of those bad advertisement situations I mentioned above. Together we can change the world!
