This report describes the progress made from April, 2002 through January, 2003 in the UC-Irvine evaluation of the California Safe Routes to School construction program. The UC-Irvine research is a pre- and post-evaluation of selected California SR2S sites to determine the effectiveness of physical changes to the local environment in (1) improving the perceived and actual safety of the walk and bicycle trip to school, and (2) enhancing the viability of the walking and bicycling environment. The goal of the research is to assess the impact of the SR2S construction program on pedestrian, bicyclist, and motorist behavior tied to safety, perceived safety, and the amount of non-motorized travel to and from school sites participating in the SR2S program.

This report describes the selection of sixteen school sites, the methods use to collect data at those school sites, and an initial description of the data at the first twelve schools included in this research.

Communities are traditionally built with one transportation mode and user in mind—the adult automobile driver. Recently, however, there has been an international focus on the trip to school as an opportunity to enhance children’s independent active travel. Several factors must be considered when designing programs to promote walking and bicycling. This paper examined the influence of child sex on caregivers’ decisions about travel mode choice to school.

Caregivers of children in grades three to five from ten California Safe Routes to School communities were surveyed on their child’s normal travel mode to school and factors that determined travel decisions. Results indicate that the odds of walking and bicycling to school are 40 percent lower in girls than boys; however, this relationship is significantly moderated by the caregiver’s own walking behavior. The findings suggest that programs that focus on increasing children’s active travel to school should consider multiple influences on health behavior, including the neighborhood physical activity of parents.

To date, the literature on urban design and walking has often emphasized more macro-scale features, such as block length and number of intersections, that are easier to measure remotely using GIS and or aerial photographs. Urban designers, in contrast, emphasize the importance of micro-scale features in individuals’ use and experience of neighborhood environments. This paper moves beyond examining correlations of individual built environment features and walking, to begin to test proposals about which composite characteristics of the built environment (safety, comfort, etc.) may have the greatest impact on walking. Several urban design characteristics of 11 neighborhoods throughout California were collected. Self-report walking data on the number and types of walking trips were obtained from surveys administered to parents of 3rd-5th graders. Urban design features related to both accessibility and safety affect the amount of walking that adults do in their neighborhood. Grouping related urban design variables into indices provides some clarity as to how the built environment impacts walking. Safety emerges as the most important built environment characteristic (of those tested), related to both destination and recreational walking.

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 10 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.

Pedestrian accidents among children are an important transportation issue. Several recent policy initiatives have focused on reducing childhood pedestrian accident in the United States, yet those efforts exist within a context of limited and often insufficient data. This paper describes new data that can give much more detailed information on the determinants of pedestrian safety near schools. The data were developed to support an ongoing evaluation of a major childhood pedestrian safety program - the California Safe Routes to School construction program.

Walking or bicycling to school could contribute to children’s daily physical activity, but physical environment changes are often needed to improve the safety and convenience of walking and cycling routes. The California Safe Routes to School (SR2S) legislation provided competitive funds for construction projects such as sidewalks, traffic lights, pedestrian crossing improvements, and bicycle paths.