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.

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.”

Skenazy is regularly chastised for trying to grant her kids a similar level of independence, and in Elizabethton, Tryon is defending herself against possible legal action for doing so.

According to Elizabethton Police Chief Matt Bailey, the street Tryon’s daughter was riding on is a busy street with a blind curve and a hill. Tryon says her daughter has taken a bicycle riding course, but the chief said an officer saw her passing a stopped school bus and a stopped police car in a particularly busy intersection in a manner that he thought was unsafe. When he approached her, he says she admitted that the traffic made her nervous, and he said that’s when he brought her home to talk to her mother about it.

Passing motorists had also expressed their concern to the police, and Child Protective Services had already talked to Tryon about it. Commenters on the Bike Walk Tennessee blog post were suspicious of the chief’s assertion that his only concern was for the girl’s safety, but that’s his position.

Still, the chief acknowledged that there’s no sensible alternative route or even a safe way to cross that intersection. There are portions of the route with no sidewalk. Apparently taking the school bus wasn’t an option for her – according to the police report, the girl said “she had been kicked off the bus before and did not like it.”

Her mother maintains that the bus isn’t necessarily much safer. “She could take the bus and be bullied, punched, hit, kicked, stabbed,” Tryon wrote. “On the way to the bus she could be hit by a car, attacked by a vicious dog, the victim of a drive by shooting. Realistically the school bus COULD crash and kill her.”

Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists, just commented on the League’s blog that Tryon’s is “a frustrating story with no obvious winners and lots of people left feeling aggrieved.” Rather than take a position on whether or not the police were correct to intervene, Clarke makes the case that the situation points to the need for greater investment in safe routes to school for kids.

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.”

The Obama administration seemingly showed its support for that healthy future by dispatching Victor Mendez, the administrator of the Federal Highway Administration. In his keynote appearance, Mendez not only highlighted the success of the program but indicated a need for more dollars.

“Since the program started in 2005, we’ve made more than $900 million available to the states and DC for Safe Routes to School programs,” he said. “All 50 states have funded projects and… the total national program is oversubscribed in terms of need. Maybe 40 percent of all applications actually get funded, which means we need to do a little bit of work in that regard.”

New data, just released by the National Center for Safe Routes to School (the government clearinghouse for SRTS data and technical assistance), shows those in-demand dollars are having a wide impact. As of June, funding has reached 11,371 individual schools and, perhaps more importantly, it hasn’t bypassed the nation’s most vulnerable children.

According to the analysis, while 21 percent of the nation’s schools are defined as low-income, 23 percent of the schools announced for SRTS funding fall into that category. In addition, projects with a specific focus on the inclusion of children with disabilities have been funded in 17 states and Native American children on tribal lands have been the focus of projects in seven states.

When asked by an audience member the best means to convince Congress members to maintain those important dollars in the next bill, Mendez said he couldn’t tell Safe Routes believers to lobby their elected officials. But another big name from Washington — James Corless, director of Transportation for America — did just that in a later session. “One thing I know is that, if none of you in this room work on these things, get active and engaged, we could lose Safe Routes and dedicated bike-ped funding,” he said. “There are just too many things pulling in that direction.”

Safe Routes supporters are already warmed up to flex their political muscle. When Rep. John Mica (R-FL) released an outline for the House transportation bill that didn’t include dedicated funding for biking and walking, more than 60,000 citizens flooded their members of Congress to demand those dedicated dollars. Both Corless and Hubsmith emphasized another, even bigger, uprising has the potential to preserve the Safe Routes program.

Still, the uncertainty has sparked discussions about how to continue the Safe Routes momentum even if Congress pares back, or eliminates, dedicated funding. Some advocates are leveraging private funding from major foundations, community grants and corporate supporters. Others are looking to the health arena, including hospitals, insurance providers, or public health departments with local- or state-funded programs that dovetail with Safe Routes objectives. Local ballot initiatives and bond measures could be a source of new dollars, too, given the successful track record in funding progressive issues in states like California.

But Hubsmith, in her remarks, didn’t even go there.

“We’ve faced these challenges before,” she said. “In 1997, there was talk about killing the Transportation Enhancements program. In 2003, there was another move to kill TE… We need to have faith. As Martin Luther King Jr said, ‘Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.’ We need to have courage. When we have courage and faith, we can win.”

Carolyn Szczepanski is communications coordinator at the Alliance for Biking & Walking.

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.

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.”

SRTS currently only applies to grades K through 8, but the Partnership aims to change that. Included in the Senate bill is language to expand limited eligibility to high schools, but only in partnership with an elementary or middle school. “In many communities, the high school and the junior high are built very close together,” said Pedroso. “So if you’re putting in a mile of sidewalk, for example, to a junior high and the high school is just a quarter mile away, it makes sense to do that extra quarter mile because you can serve a larger group of kids.”

Photo courtesy of Safe Routes to School National Partnership.

In the last Congress, the bill would have simply expanded eligibility to include high schools without limitations.

One inclusion in the bill that’s sure to please many Republicans who have been looking to trim spending and reduce project delays is a provision to address “regulatory burden.” Indeed, Pedroso says, despite the categorical exclusion for bike and pedestrian projects from the mandate for environmental review, many times SRTS projects had to go through many bureaucratic hurdles for even the smallest of projects.

The language that created Safe Routes to School stipulated that SRTS projects be treated like federal aid highways, forced to meet the highest review standards. “These regulations were designed with large-scale, complicated construction projects in mind,” said Pedroso. “When you’re applying them to a couple-hundred-thousand-dollar sidewalk project that’s usually within the right-of-way of an existing road, that’s a lot of paperwork, and for the size of the grant, a big percentage of that is being spent on regulatory compliance.”

States were making project recipients prove they were exempt from environmental review. AASHTO is producing a best-practices guide for states to implement SRTS projects. “It would help to have clarification that for non-infrastructure projects you don’t have to fill out construction paperwork. That actually does happen. You get a $5,000 bicycle and pedestrian safety education grant and you’re filling out construction paperwork for it.”

The bill is technically a proposal to amend SAFETEA-LU, but since SAFETEA-LU is at the end of its life span, it will be considered as part of the reauthorization debate for the whole surface transportation program. It’s been referred to the Environment and Public Works Committee.

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.

“We’re asking kids not just to learn how to be better pedestrians, but how to ask drivers to be better drivers,” said DOT education and outreach assistant commissioner Kim Wiley-Schwartz (formerly of Livable Streets Education, a project of OpenPlans, Streetsblog’s parent organization). The city is looking to bring the curriculum to other schools, especially ones located in areas with high rates of crashes and injuries.

With the city embarking on a campaign to raise awareness of the speed limit and why it matters, teaching kids about the risks of speeding could help get the message out and change attitudes. “Boys and girls like you can be eyes and ears for adults,” said City Council transportation chair Jimmy Vacca at yesterday’s presser. “You can let adults know that they go too fast too often.”

Fourth grader Kiara Aramore said she already told her mother about the 30 mph speed limit. “If you ever get into a car, it’s important for safety,” she said. While her mom doesn’t own a car, Kiara said that “if she gets into a car she should tell the person who’s driving to go the speed limit.”

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.)

(Chart: NCSRS/SRSNP)

The percentage of U.S. students between ages five and 14 who walk or bike to school has remained stable over the past 15 years but remains three-quarters below where it stood 40 years ago, according to a new analysis of government data by two groups working on the Safe Routes to School (SRtS) program.

Crunching numbers from the U.S. DOT's National Household Travel Survey, the National Center for SRtS and the SRtS National Partnership concluded that between 1969 and 2009, school transportation habits essentially flipped -- with auto use rising from 12 percent of the student population to 44 percent, and biking or walking going from a 48-percent popularity rate with kids to just 13 percent.

Despite the fact that the share of students choosing to walk or bike to school has remained around 12 percent since 1995, the SRtS groups saw a silver lining to their findings: Their efforts appear to be making headway when it comes to shorter trips from home to school. When the data was restricted to students traveling less than one mile to classes, 38 percent walked or biked last year.

“There is a real opportunity to change the car culture and make school campuses less congested if more of the parents who are driving shorter distances let their children walk or bike to school, and those who driving further distances let their children ride school buses,” Lauren Marchetti, director of the National Center for SRtS, said in a statement.

SRtS directs federal transportation dollars to help localities build dedicated infrastructure for kids up to age 14 to walk or bike to school. Members of Congress from both parties have endorsed legislation that would expand the program to high schools as part of the next six-year federal transport bill.

Safe Routes to School programs could see a boost from the health bill's grant program. (Photo: CA DOT)

The process isn't quite finished yet -- the Senate still must take up a series of tweaks to its original bill under the filibuster-proof reconciliation framework for debate -- but the meat of the upper chamber's health proposal is set to become law by week's end.

Once that occurs, a new pool of federal "Community Transformation" grants would be established, with local governments and nonprofit groups eligible for a share of the funding. As Streetsblog Capitol Hill noted back in November, the grants would go towards projects that support public health, including "activities to prevent chronic diseases" and "the infrastructure to support active living."

In practice, that could result in new funding available for bike-ped improvements or programs that encourage safe transportation for young students, such as Safe Routes to School.

The Senate bill also recognizes transportation's role in public health by giving the U.S. DOT a seat on a new National Prevention, Health Promotion and Public Health Council that would coordinate federal wellness policy.

Michelle Obama visited "Sesame Street" last fall as part of her push to fight childhood obesity. Photo: Daily News

Mrs. Obama appeared with six Cabinet members, the Surgeon General, and several lawmakers and mayors to mark the president's official creation of a new Task Force on Childhood Obesity. As part of the first lady's new effort, the White House plans to expand the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, while setting up a Safe and Healthy Schools Fund during hte next reauthorization of federal elementary education law.

In her remarks to the press this afternoon, Mrs. Obama paid particular attention to the lifestyle shifts that have led many kids to a more sedentary routine -- and helped contribute to obesity rates of 17 percent for children and teens, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. (The same study found that one of every three U.S. kids are oversight.)

The first lady said:

In my home, we weren't rich. The foods we ate weren't fancy. But there was always a vegetable on the plate. And we managed to lead a pretty healthy life.

Many kids today aren't so fortunate. Urban sprawl and fears about safety often mean the only walking they do is out their front door to a bus or a car. Cuts in recess and gym mean a lot less running around during the school day, and lunchtime may mean a school lunch heavy on calories and fat. For many kids, those afternoons spent riding bikes and playing ball until dusk have been replaced by afternoons inside with TV, the Internet, and video games.

The frequently-ignored "One Way" sign at Briggs Avenue and East Moshulu Parkway. Image: NY1

A report from NY1's Susan Jhun today describes the dangerous conditions at an intersection right next to P.S. 8 in the Norwood neighborhood of the Bronx, where parents and students constantly contend with cars darting the wrong way down the block.

Here, motorists on Briggs Avenue make an illegal left turn onto a short stretch of East Moshulu Parkway, in order to quickly cut over to East 203rd Street. Even with parents complaining about the danger to their kids posed by unexpected wrong-way traffic, police haven't made the intersection safe. 

Moshulu Parkway is clearly marked as one-way, but according to parents, drivers make illegal lefts "hour after hour." The police, however, don't seem inclined to measure the problem and tackle it with the data-driven techniques they apply to violent crime. The underlying assumption that NYPD has employed so successfully with CompStat is that you have to be able to count crime to fight it; right now, the NYPD isn't doing much of either when it comes to law-breaking behavior behind the wheel.

When NY1 called the NYPD, police said that 20 summonses had been issued in the last 60 days. The more important question is whether those tickets are actually reducing the risk to students and parents. So does the 52nd Precinct in the Bronx have a plan to systematically improve safety at P.S. 8? What sort of resources would they need to measure the problem and enforce the rules effectively? The precinct has not responded to Streetsblog's calls.

The NYPD has trouble answering questions about street safety because police grade their traffic enforcement performance mainly by counting summonses. The actual rate of traffic violations, which can be measured, is one metric they have so far ignored.

The parents of P.S. 8 know exactly how big a problem it is when cars drive the wrong way down a one-way street in front of a school. So should the police.

Over the past few months, Livable Streets Education has worked with schools across New York City on We're Walking Here NYC. Educators were asked to engage students in an exercise that highlights the importance of safety, healthy choices, walkable streets and sustainable transportation, and to share that message with others. This was the pilot run of our web-based project and we had a great group of participants. Next fall we plan to continue the initiative and invite any and all NYC schools to join in. 

Our grand prize winner was P.S. 8 in Brooklyn for their video PSA, "Why Should You Walk to School?" It was created by Class 3-305 with teacher Melissa Browning.

We had a tough decision as many schools did a great job. Our other winners are listed after the jump.

Mayor Bloomberg has already shown how much his administration can accomplish in just a few years. Since Janette Sadik-Khan's appointment to head the DOT in 2007, the city has striped hundreds of miles of bike lanes, reclaimed acres of street space for pedestrians and improved bus travel for tens of thousands of New Yorkers. "More of the same" is no longer a dirty phrase when it comes to local transportation policy. During the next four years, the mayor needs to accelerate this progress, and introduce a few key innovations to maximize the value New Yorkers get from their new streets.

There is plenty of room to build on the Bloomberg administration's record of support for safer, greener streets. Photosim of 34th Street: Luc Nadal and Marc De Decker, ITDP.

Well, the release of DOT's Street Design Manual back in July was an especially auspicious development. This groundbreaking playbook contains templates that can transform streets in neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. The manual is an engineering document, but it also makes sense as an outreach tool. Community groups concerned about street safety could use the manual as a menu, requesting traffic calming solutions for their neighborhood from DOT. Liberal use of these new designs, applied through a smart community-based process, could pay huge dividends all over the city.

For a fraction of the cost of subway line construction, buses could move millions, if the mayor throws his weight behind BRT.

One sensible way for the NYPD to roll out this approach to traffic enforcement would be to start in areas frequented by children and seniors. Seniors make up 12 percent of New York's population, yet account for 39 percent of pedestrian fatalities. And according to the Department of Health, auto traffic is the leading cause of injury-related death in children ages 1-14. DOT's Safe Routes to School and Safe Routes for Seniors programs have spawned imitators around the country, but our city is no longer the national leader. Other cities are now far ahead of New York when it comes to implementing these street safety programs. Combined with police enforcement, short-term and inexpensive improvements such as leading pedestrian intervals, reductions in signalized crossing speeds, and a citywide slower speed limit in school zones would prioritize pedestrians, save the lives of children and seniors, and get New York City back in the forefront of planning streets for safety.

Greater safety helps more New Yorkers feel at ease riding on our streets. As the city's bike network matures, a large-scale public bike-share system is a no brainer. Bike-sharing weaves cycling into the larger transportation network. In Paris, Velib tripled cycling in a few months with 20,000 bikes spread over 1,400 stations. Montrealers took more than a million rides on Bixi in fewer than six months, and similar gains have been repeated around the globe. The same explosive growth would happen in New York overnight, if Mayor Bloomberg backed bike-share in a big way. Seventy-four percent of trips here are five miles or less, meaning they're very bikeable and easily converted to bike-share trips. If he builds it, they will come.

The same is true of new and better bike facilities. Since the city installed the Ninth Avenue cycle track, biking on the West Side has gotten safer, and so has walking. In Brooklyn, the Kent Avenue protected path is having an identical effect. Traffic-protected bike lanes on Queens Boulevard, through upper Manhattan, down the Upper West Side, and all along the East Side -- where there is a dearth of safe space for cyclists -- would encourage thousands more New Yorkers to ride.

Mayor Bloomberg is a MetroCard guy, but it's much easier to spot him on the subway than riding the bus. That should change in the next four years. Although 2.4 million people ride New York City Transit buses each weekday, the bus system is the city's most underperforming transportation resource. Improvements like pre-paid boarding and signal priority, which have been installed along Fordham Road in the Bronx, could speed service on bus routes around the city. And a true Bus Rapid Transit network, with dedicated lanes for buses and level boarding for passengers, would add another dimension to our transit system. For a fraction of the cost of subway line construction, buses could move millions, if the mayor throws his weight behind BRT.

Mayor Mike has a lot on his plate in the coming weeks, months and years. But if he wants to keep New York City moving toward a sustainable future and shore up his legacy as the Livable City mayor, then safer streets, robust bike-share and better buses are the fastest way to get there.

NYC bike-share on the horizon? DOT says it will explore a "large-scale" public bike system for Manhattan and environs. Image: Department of City Planning.

In an update to the strategic plan released this month, DOT lays out several new benchmarks, including some glimpses of the agency's goals for the rest of 2009 and 2010. The document isn't available online yet, but Streetsblog has a hard copy so I thought I'd share a few highlights:

• Bike modeshare targets are more ambitious than before. The goal is now to double bike commuting by 2012 and triple it by 2017 compared to 2007 levels. The previous goal was to double cycling by 2015. If annual increases stay close to last year's 35 percent clip, the new target should be easily achievable, especially if the next item turns into something concrete...
• DOT will "explore opportunities for a large-scale public bicycle system in Manhattan and surrounding areas." The agency had previously signaled its interest in launching a bike-share network, but I believe this is the first official hint of the scale they're contemplating.
• 8-10 new rapid bus corridors will be selected by the end of this year. (DOT had already posted a timeline for this process on its website.)
• DOT will increase the number of 20 mph zones around schools from 25 to 75.
• More templates from the Street Design Manual will take shape on city streets. "Shared streets" are mentioned as a potential new design treatment.
  
• Summer Streets will expand "to additional days and areas."
• To keep cabs out of bus lanes, the city will make greater use of bus-mounted enforcement cameras. (The city launched a pilot enforcement program along these lines on 34th Street back in February.)
• Some single-space parking meters, which are being decommissioned by the thousands as more muni-meters are installed, will be converted to bike racks.
  
• PARK Smart, a performance parking program that DOT has piloted in Greenwich Village and Park Slope, will help manage the curb crunch in more neighborhoods.
  

Transportation advocates welcomed the new goals. "Increasing 20 mph zones around schools is really exciting," said Transportation Alternatives' Wiley Norvell. "It's a good, concrete metric for boosting Safe Routes to School. That's definitely something that's lagged and needs acceleration."

Norvell also applauded the accelerated timetable for boosting bike modeshare. "It's great to see the DOT setting more ambitious targets, given that the installation of bike lanes has ramped up cycling significantly," he said. "New York City needs to keep moving the goalposts when it comes to bicycling. The goals of 2006 were rendered obsolete by 2008. The goals of 2009 will probably seem obsolete by 2011."

Image courtesy of Howard Frumkin [PDF].

Livable Streets Education was among the presenters, and we learned quite a bit ourselves about the safe routes to school movement. We wanted to share with Streetsblog readers some insights that we picked up from two of the headliners at the conference.

Graphic: Richard Jackson [PDF]

It can all seem overwhelming. But as Jackson pointed out, there are plenty of ways to make these problems feel more manageable. As he said, it really comes down to asking yourself: "Can I walk to buy milk?"

Another keynoter, Howard Frumkin, director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health, elaborated on the same theme. Rather than generate fear, despair, anxiety, he said, we need to communicate the changes we must make with accuracy and balance. We don't want people to mentally check out or give up when they hear the facts -- we need constructive engagement.

That's where "Safe Routes to School" comes in: It's a solution that's easy to grasp and feels like something we are capable of achieving. We can demand sidewalks, we can set up “walking school buses” to get kids to school. These are doable steps with benefits ranging from improved cardiovascular health to reduced carbon emissions. And it will help raise a new generation to appreciate the experience of walking, biking, and meeting your neighbors.

You can learn more about how to support the Safe Routes to School movement by checking out the National Center for Safe Routes to School and the Safe Routes National Partnership. You might also want to consider asking your senator to support Senate Bill 1156, the Safe Routes to School Reauthorization Bill.

If you know of New York City teachers who want to get their classes directly involved in these issues, check out Livable Streets Education’s fall project, We’re Walking Here NYC. New York is a city of walkers, a fact that students can celebrate on Walk to School Day, coming up on October 7. Look for a post with further details next week.

Photo: Staten Island Advance.

Staten Island's newest speed trap is snaring unsuspecting drivers who must drop from a highway speed of 50 mph to 30 mph on the off-ramp, to a 20-mph crawl outside a school zone off the South Avenue exit of the Staten Island Expressway.

Police have been issuing summonses to lead-footed drivers who missed or ignored the new diamond-shaped yellow signs alongside Goethals Road North in Graniteville, where the new Staten Island School of Civic Leadership for grades K-8 opened earlier this month.

The tickets were given out as part of a targeted enforcement initiative, police said. While officers won't be outside the school every day, it will be on their rotating list of "hot spots," because of the nature of the school zone, and because a pedestrian was hit on the street in the past.

So, enforcing the speed limit near an area swarming with kids -- everyone can get behind that, right? Not if you identify with those "unsuspecting drivers" more than the K-8 students who have to navigate the streets near their school. Proving that no form of traffic enforcement can avoid scorn from a certain subset of motorists, many Advance commenters take the speed trap as evidence of a city campaign to "milk the taxpayer."

As irresponsible as it may be to call speed enforcement a revenue-generating exercise, some of the complainers kind of have a point. This stretch of Goethals Road North is definitely sending some mixed signals. Those 20 mph school zone signs compete for drivers' attention with huge green highway signs on a street that looks designed for maximal vehicular flow. The stepped-up enforcement is great, and let's hope the cops keep it up, because the students at the School of Civic Leadership need it. They also need a street designed to put drivers on notice that doing 40 is totally wrong and unacceptable.

Photo: Josh Brustein/New York Times.

There are no estimates about how prevalent bicycle commuting is among parents, students and teachers at New York City’s schools, but a morning spent in front of P.S. 261 gives credibility to Ms. Faux’s claim that she is not an anomaly. P.S. 261, which has about 830 students, is one of 34 schools to have requested that the Department of Transportation install bike racks through the department’s CityRacks program. Last spring, the department installed five bike racks in front of the school, giving parents an alternative to the chain-link fence that they had been using to lock up bicycles to that point.

The school’s principal, Zipporiah Mills, said that the racks had made it easier on parents, and that the popularity of bringing children to school on bicycles had been growing for several years.

Also among the parents Brustein interviews: Livable Streets Education director Kim Wiley-Schwartz, who's raising two kids to ride bikes.

This actually got me thinking about Saturday night's bike slam design battle. Team New York, you were on to something with this whole Safe Zones thing. How many more parents and childrens would bike to school if they had safe routes to travel?