How You Can Use Seattle Safe Routes To School Resources
- Oct. 9, 2015
Cathy Tuttle
October 8, 2015
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray just announced his Safe Streets Healthy Schools and Communities: 5-Year Action Plan. Parents, caregivers, and school neighbors all over Seattle are eager to put this plan into practice.
Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) offers Safe Routes to School mini-grants of up to $1000 that are easy to apply for with a letter of support from a school PTSA or Principal. (Deadlines April 30 and Oct 30). SDOT mini-grants can be used to do safe routes audits that help to put the Action Plan into action!
The Action Plan comes with a variety of thoughtful tools for making Walk Zones around Seattle schools safe for our kids. The tools include an engineering toolkit and a guide to managing school drop off and pick up.
Safe Walk Zones for our kids is a high priority for Seattle Neighborhood Greenways. We recently teamed up to do a workshop with Brian Dougherty, Seattle Department of Transportation's (SDOT) amazing Safe Routes to School Coordinator who explained the use of the SDOT toolkit and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcAr3R60tPg
Here is an expanded list of some well-tested tools to get you started doing Safe Routes to School Audits:
- Tips on Leading a Walk and Bike Audit
- A Guide to Starting a SRTS Campaign at Your School
- SRTS Engineering Toolkit
- School Drop off and Pick up Handbook
- Walkability checklist
- Bikeability checklist
- SDOT Schools ranked for crosswalk & walkway projects for 2015-16
- Build Your Group
- Map out areas that you'd like to study (often places with near-misses or collisions)
- Walk proposed routes with one or two people before going out and doing a larger group audit
- Travel along routes with no more than five to eight people. Have a larger group? Split up to cover more area
- Do Your Walk Audit
- Make sure your walk isn't too long -- about an hour lets you focus on areas of greatest concern.
- Choose your walk time to coincide with arrival and departure times so you can watch how children enter and leave school. Kids use streets in ways you might not expect!
- Take photos and possibly video to study and include in reports
- Write Your Report to SDOT
- Focus on PROBLEMS, not on solutions. Let SDOT recommend great solutions based on experience
- Prioritize! Choose no more than five top priorities of street improvements that will need time and money to fix. Discuss and agree on these top five priorities with group consensus
- Observe and report what you think is little but important too - a malfunctioning traffic light, overgrown vegetation -- report on Find-it Fix-it or jot it down in your report -- and build some quick wins
- Make your report to SDOT short & sweet, a page or two at most
- Check in with SDOT (Brian Dougherty) before you apply for Small and Simple or Neighborhood Park and Street Fund funding
- Learn who is responsible for problem properties -- for example, neighbors or a local business may have overgrown vegetation or Seattle Parks may control access that SDOT cannot address
