California’s Safe Routes to School Program Impacts on Walking, Bicycling, and Pedestrian Safety

Safe Routes to School (SR2S) programs have generated tremendous interest among U.S. policymakers, planners, and public health officials in recent years. These programs target the walk to school as an essential point of intervention to improve pedestrian safety and increase physical activity among children. In this article, we evaluate California’s pioneering SR2S construction program, which was designed to improve safety for children’s walking and bicycling to school, and to increase the number of children who do so, by funding traffic engineering improvements around schools. Through a systematic evaluation of  California SR2S traffic improvement projects near elementary schools, we examined the impacts of this influential state policy on children’s travel behavior in these neighborhoods. We investigated changes in the perceived safety of children’s trips to school, in safety-related behaviors tied to the trip to school, and in the number of children walking and bicycling to school following these improvements. The findings have implications for California’s SR2S program and for similar initiatives throughout the country.