How You Can Use Seattle Safe Routes To School Resources

Mayor Ed Murray launches Safe Routes to School Action Plan Oct 8 2015Cathy 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:
  1. Tips on Leading a Walk and Bike Audit
  2. A Guide to Starting a SRTS Campaign at Your School
  3. SRTS Engineering Toolkit
  4. School Drop off and Pick up Handbook
  5. Walkability checklist 
  6. Bikeability checklist
  7. SDOT Schools ranked for crosswalk & walkway projects for 2015-16
  Here is advice from SDOT Safe Routes to School Coordinator Brian Dougherty about doing school safety audits:
  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
Have fun and do good work as you build a safe way for our children to get to school. Thank you! Andrew and Davis Glass-Hastings say 20 is Plenty