Streetsblog New York City

Kids celebrate Walk to School Day in Harlem in October. Photo: NYC DOT/Flickr

DOT today launched a new initiative to help students stay physically active by walking to school.

Schools that register for the Walk Ways program will be offered lesson plans on educating students about the benefits of walking and assistance from DOT in developing walk-to-school routes.

Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan was joined by Ed Koch at P.S. 64 in the East Village for today’s kick-off event, where the former mayor read from “Eddie Shapes Up,” a children’s book written by Koch and his sister Pat Koch Thaler about “an overweight student’s path to getting healthy by eating better and exercising more.”

In a press release, Koch singled out recent DOT street safety enhancements for praise.

“The most marvelous sight in New York City is to see youngsters, adolescents and adults cycling on the many bicycle paths we now have which separate bikers from vehicular traffic,” said Koch, who installed (and removed) the city’s first protected bike lanes in the early 1980s. “It is glorious to watch, and I wish I were young again to participate.”

School registration info and campaign materials are available on the DOT web site.

It’s back-to-school time, and along with it, the requisite crackdown over kids getting to school by bike. A few years ago, we highlighted cases from Mississippi to British Columbia where authorities stopped kids from walking alone.

There's no Google street view of the intersection where Tryon's daughter was stopped for riding her bike, but here's the same street, close to the school.

And now, we have the case of Teresa Tryon of Tennessee, threatened with criminal charges for letting her child ride a bike to school.

Bike Walk Tennessee highlighted the case on its blog, saying it was “crazy” to threaten a mother with arrest for doing more or less what all parents should be doing: encouraging active lifestyles for our kids.

“On August 25th, my 10-year[-old] daughter arrived home via police officer,” Tryon said. “The officer informed me that in his ‘judgment’ it was unsafe for my daughter to ride her bike to school.”

Bike Walk Tennessee says Tryon’s daughter’s route to school was reasonably safe, and Tryon herself said Monday that she “passed a total of eight cars in the four times” she was on that road that day. Observers say it is an un-striped, residential street.

Nonetheless, when Tryon complained to the police, she was reportedly told that until the officer can speak with Child Protective Services, “if I allow my daughter to ride/walk to school I will be breaking the law and treated accordingly.” She asked what law she would be breaking, and was told the answer was “child neglect.” The officer acknowledged Tryon’s daughter wasn’t breaking any laws.

Columnist Lenore Skenazy regularly writes about giving children the independence to make their way around their neighborhoods freely and unsupervised. In a recent post, she points to a child development book from 1979, when six-year-olds could be expected to be able to “travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home.”

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Photo: TreeHugger

This week, the Safe Routes to School National Conference convenes in Minneapolis, a progressive city determined to become the most bicycle friendly in the nation. But even here, far from the nation’s capital, in a region celebrated for its massive greenway system, drama inside the Beltway has instilled an air of urgency to the event.

In 2005, SAFETEA-LU (Safe, Accountable, Flexible and Efficient Transportation Equity Act) created the federal Safe Routes to School program to get more kids to bike and walk to school by improving infrastructure and creating encouragement programs that make those active trips safe and appealing. The funding for the program is but a tiny drop in the mammoth transportation budget — a mere 0.25 percent of federal transportation spending. But those dollars have been a crucial foundation in building a wide and growing movement.

Deb Hubsmith, director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership. Photo: Carolyn Szczepanski

As is the case for so many progressive programs, though, there’s a very real threat that the well of dedicated dollars for Safe Routes to School could dry up in the next transportation bill. That was apparent from the opening moments of the biennial gathering.

Deb Hubsmith, the director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership and a key player in developing and advancing “Safe Routes” nationwide, appealed to a huge crowd of more than 600 participants for three things: courage, faith and immediate action.

“As you know, we have some challenges,” she said. “Some people might be discouraged by what they’ve heard about Congress and the federal debt. The transportation bill is up for reauthorization and there’s fighting about what will happen with the future. Some say Safe Routes to School is not a federal priority.”

“In the face of this discussion right now, we need to have courage,” she added. “We need to know that some of the best outcomes come from challenges in front of us. When something is at risk it creates an opportunity; do we want to go backwards or have a future with healthy kids and healthy communities.”

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Two years ago, the Bronx Helpers decided to take action about a dangerous intersection in their neighborhood. The team of middle and high-schoolers, participants in a community service group run by the New Settlement Apartments, routinely crossed the street at 172nd and Townsend. They all could recount traffic crashes they’d seen at the corner, with some cars coming dangerously close to hitting their friends. The intersection sits between two schools, an afterschool program, and the students’ homes, but doesn’t even have a visible crosswalk, much less a design prioritizing safety.  With another school under construction at Jerome and 172nd, the need for safety is only going to get more urgent.

As part of a program that teaches civic engagement, the Bronx Helpers started to organize. Asking at first for a stop sign at the corner, they collected 1,039 signatures from their neighbors, presented the petition to Bronx Community Board 4, and wrote a letter to the Department of Transportation.

The youth’s impressive organizing didn’t lead to any safety improvements, however. DOT sent them a letter promising to conduct a study on the stop sign and provide the results within 12 weeks. When their request was rejected six months later, the students asked for the details of the study, which DOT refused to provide.

The teens didn’t give up. In December, they teamed up with Transportation Alternatives to add some traffic safety expertise to their efforts. With radar guns and surveys, they tracked unsafe driver behavior in the neighborhood and mapped it against pedestrian volumes.

They also changed their request from a stop sign — which may not actually improve pedestrian safety — to more effective physical traffic calming measures like curb extensions, daylighted intersections, and speed bumps. In March, DOT promised to study a wider array of traffic calming measures in a second 12-week study.

While DOT performs its study, the Bronx Helpers are keeping up the pressure. On May 11, they threw a party for the kids in their neighborhood to raise support for the traffic calming measures. “Safety first, before the worst,” they chanted during a rally at the event, which you can see in the video above.

Hopefully, when DOT’s study comes out, it will recommend a robust set of safety improvements for 172nd and Townsend.

Like everyone else, Safe Routes to School advocates are scaling back. Last year, a bill introduced in the Senate asked for $600 million to enhance pedestrian and bike safety near schools. “We were working in a pretty different environment,” said Margo Pedroso, deputy director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership. “Everybody was talking about a $500 billion transportation bill. So we figured, we don’t know what the full bill will be in the end, but let’s go for the funding we feel like we need.”

Kids biking to school in Illinois. Photo courtesy of Safe Routes to School National Partnership.

This week, 12 Democratic Senators introduced a bill to maintain current funding for Safe Routes to School at $183 million and keep it as a standalone program.

Those seem like reasonable goals, but even they will be a haul. The next reauthorization, as we’ve been amply warned, may be even smaller than the last one, given low revenues. And everyone from the administration on down is in favor of consolidating programs, meaning Safe Routes to School would be one piece of a much bigger pie called “Livability.”

It’s also telling that the Partnership couldn’t get a single Republican co-sponsor on the bill. Last time around, they had three. But this time, with everything getting cut, GOP lawmakers were reluctant to “play favorites” and recommend one program for sustained funding. And with the reauthorization process well underway, the Partnership didn’t want to wait any longer to try to attract GOP sponsors. They moved the bill forward with Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) taking the lead.

Safe Routes to school pulls communities together to identify trouble spots that prevent parents from feeling safe letting their kids walk or bike to school. Sometimes it means building or widening a sidewalk. Sometimes parents create “walking school buses,” where an adult accompanies a whole gaggle of kids on their walk. Sometimes it means raising crosswalks or calming traffic or installing flashing School Zone signs. In communities where crime or harassment is the biggest deterrent, SRTS works with police to address personal safety.

In some communities, Pedroso acknowledges, walking to school just isn’t an option. So the new bill allows for 10 percent of SRTS funds to be spent on safe routes to bus stops. “In really, really rural communities where kids live miles and miles from school, they’re not going to be able to walk or bike to school,” said Pedroso. “What they’re often struggling with is safety getting to the bus. And they may be walking on these county roads where there are no shoulders, no lighting, they’re right up against the tree line, and there’s really not a safe place for them.”

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DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and City Council transportation chair Jimmy Vacca measure speeds on Atlantic Avenue with students from PS 261. Photo: Ben Fried

Students at Brooklyn’s PS 261 have clocked motorists traveling on Atlantic Avenue at an average midday speed of 38 mph — and as high as 50 mph. While the city’s 30 mph speed limit is a mystery to most New Yorkers, the students knew they were watching people break the law and put others in danger.

As part of a new program through NYC DOT’s Office of Education and Outreach, these fourth graders recently picked up some lessons about traffic safety (and math and physics), like the fact that stopping distances increase exponentially with vehicle speeds. Their teacher, Colleen Greto, said a jaw-dropping moment came when kids chalked out 160 feet — the stopping distance for cars traveling at 40 mph — on the ground of their schoolyard.

Just knowing the speed limit makes these kids experts on driving safety compared to most people who live in this city. “You guys know more than seven out of ten New Yorkers,” Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told the class at a press event yesterday announcing the program.

The new curriculum is a departure from longstanding street safety education tactics, which portray car traffic as an implacable force of nature. The underlying premise is that there’s more to safety education than looking both ways before you cross the street.

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A 13-year-old crossing Rockaway Parkway to attend Canarsie High School was hit and killed this morning. Image: Google Street View.

A driver struck and killed a 13-year-old girl this morning, apparently as she tried to walk to school. The driver, a male in his 40s, hit the victim on Rockaway Parkway at 7:50 this morning, according to the NYPD. She was pronounced dead at Brookdale Hospital.

The victim was likely on her way to attend Canarsie High School, according to a report in the Daily News. She was crossing mid-block on a path to the school’s front door when the driver struck her. The school, which is in the process of being closed by the Department of Education, has an enrollment of 881 students.

After hitting the student, the driver swerved into a parked car on the side of the road. The driver stayed at the scene until he was taken to Brookdale for trauma treatment, according to the police. NYPD has not filed charges.

For those of you who don’t know him yet – meet Zozo. He’s our big purple friend who loves anything that gets people out of cars and moving about the streets. You might find him riding his ZoGo along the new Prospect Park West bike lane, sitting out in the pedestrian plazas on Broadway, or catching the 4 train to amble about the city. (In this video, you’ll also see him joined by a special guest about 20 seconds in.)

So, we can’t think of a better way to get ready for this year’s International Walk to School Day on October 6, than to get the info directly from Zozo. According to the folks at the National Center for Safe Routes to School, this awareness-builder began in 1997 when the Partnership for a Walkable America sponsored the first Walk Our Children to School Day in Chicago. Since 2002, it’s become a worldwide event, with schools in all 50 states leading the way for healthier kids. Make sure you get out and walk or ride your bike that day!

In 2009, there were great events in New York City and San Francisco that Streetfilms captured. For more info on this year’s event, go to www.walktoschool.org. 

The site of this morning's crash: 53rd Avenue in front of Bayside's PS 162. Photo: Google Street View

The mother of a student at PS 162 in Queens is in critical condition after a driver struck her in front of the school this morning. The crash occurred as the parent was crossing 53rd Avenue between 201st and 202nd Streets at around 9:10 this morning, in view of students and teachers, according to a press release from Council Member Mark Weprin.

The driver, who remained at the scene, has been charged with failure to yield and driving with a suspended license, according to the NYPD. Eyewitnesses cited in Weprin's release said the driver was speeding.  

Weprin called on the Department of Transportation to install speed humps, traffic lights, or other measures to calm traffic in front of the school. Whatever the right solution is for PS 162, New York City sorely needs better enforcement to prevent reckless drivers from injuring people on city streets. The crash this morning is also a reminder that the city's commitment to Safe Routes to School must still be strengthened significantly to ensure that it's safe for children and families to walk to every one of its thousands of public, private, and parochial schools.

This morning, Brooklyn's MS 51 became the first school in the five boroughs to host a bike-to-school day. Students biked in two escorted rides, one starting in Sunset Park and the other in Carroll Gardens, with more riders joining each bike pool at pick-up spots along the way.

The students, parents, and educators at MS 51 pulled off the bike-to-school event with some help from the New York City Department of Transportation, Bike New York and Matthew Modine's Bicycle for a Day charity. To get ready for the ride, Bike New York held workshops to teach the students about bike safety and riding techniques. As principal Lenore Berner told us, maybe an event like this can help kids bike to school on other days, too.

(Editor's note: Enjoy the long weekend folks. We'll see you back here on Tuesday.)