Best Routes to School and Race

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In 2005 Congress approved the funding for the implementation of Safe Routes to School programs for all fifty states (Safe Routes to School) The program Safe Routes to School is an initiative to encourage and increase the number of school-aged children to walk or bike to school. The initiative looks at improving infrastructure and educating the public to make it safe and convenient for children to walk and bike to school(Oregon Department of Transportation). In the United States in the 1970’s, half of the children in the country either walked or rode their bicycle to school. Today, only 15 percent of children bike or walk to school (Hubsmith, 2006). The goal for Safe Routes to School is to get more children walking and biking school, to improve their safety and increase well being (Safe Routes to School).

The Safe Routes to School has six key components that summarize the scope of the work the initiative is trying to accomplish(Safe Routes to School). The six components are the following:

·        Education:  Give students and the community the skills needed and teach the benefits of walking and biking to school. 
·        Encouragement: Make biking and walking to school fun through a variety of events and programs.
·        Engineering: Creating new infrastructure or fixing existing infrastructure to make the place routes to school safer and convenient.
·        Enforcement: Enforcing vehicle traffic surrounding school routes.
·        Evaluation: Evaluating which approaches are most useful, consequences, and opportunities for improvement.  Evaluate if programs result in equitable outcomes 
·        Equity: Making sure that the programs are benefitting all demographic groups specifically: low-income students, students of color, students of all genders and students with disabilities.

The Safe Routes to School initiative has been in the US for the past 13 years. While I was doing more research on Safe Routes to School, I failed to see any mention of how the program was addressing racial profiling for our communities of color while they bike to school. Children as young as three years old have been targeted by police for riding their bike while being black (Choudhury, 2015). In Hillsborough County Tampa, 12 years of traffic violations were reviewed and discovered that black individuals were given “astronomically high number of bike tickets” the Tampa police 80 percent of their bike tickets to Blacks (Choudhury, 2015). This is not only seen in Florida but throughout the nations, including in Chicago and Los Angeles (Brazeal, 2018).  African-Americans or Black individuals had the lowest rate of commuting by bike in the United States at 0.3 percent, while Individuals who identified as Hispanic or Two or more Races biked 0.7 percent (US Census). I would love to know what the Safe Routes to School initiative are doing so our Black and Brown children are doing to address this problem? Especially, as equity is one of their guiding principals.


Written by: Sofia Alvarez-Castro
Edited by: Wells Wait


Brazeal, C. (2018). Chicago Police Still Targeting Black Ciclyst. Planetizen. Retried from:
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2018/03/97510-chicago-police-still-targeting-black-cyclists

Choudhury, N. (2015). If You’re Black or Brown and Ride a Bike in Tampa, Watch Out: Police Find That Suspicious. American Civil Liberties Union. Retrieved from:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/race-and-criminal-justice/if-youre-black-or-brown-and-ride-bike-tampa-watch-out

Deborah A. Hubsmith. (2006). Safe Routes to School in the United States. Children, Youth, and Environments, 16(1), 168-190. Retrieved from from:http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.16.1.0168

Mckenzie, B. (2014). Modes Less Traveled- Bicycling and Walking to work in the United States: 2008-2012, American Community Survey Reports. United States Census Bureau. Retrieved from: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2014/acs/acs-25.pdf

Oregon Department of Transportation. (2018). Oregon Safe Routes to School Programs. Retrieved from: https://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/Programs/Pages/SRTS.aspx

Safe Routes to School. (2018). Safe Routes to School National Partnership. Retrieved from: https://www.saferoutespartnership.org/safe-routes-school


Safe Routes to School. (2018). The 6 E’s of Safe Routes to School.  Retrieved from: https://www.saferoutespartnership.org/safe-routes-school/101/6-Es

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