Safe Routes to School
Since 1999, a collaborative effort of several County government agencies, Arlington Public Schools, and a number of student and parent groups, have made some significant progress towards encouraging students to walk and bicycle to school.
Maps for Individual Arlington Elementary and Middle Schools
Want to plan which route to take between your home and your neighborhood elementary or middle school?
Arlington Public Schools posts elementary and middle school "walk zone" maps on the Arlington Public Schools website; use them to plan the best route to your school based on locations of traffic signals, stop and yield signs, and cross walks with and without crossing guards.
The E's
Arlington's program is modeled on "Safe Routes to Schools" - an exciting program that has taken hold across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Arlington quickly recognized the relevance of "Safe Routes" to our community and built an initiative centered around the following areas:
Education
Although Safe Routes to Schools is a year-round program, Arlington joins with many other communities internationally each year in observing Walk to School Day during the month of October. Each year, Arlington Public Schools uses this occasion to keep Safe Routes in the consciousness of all APS parents and students by sending home a letter from the Superintendent reminding families of the safest routes to their particular school. Parents may also receive a walking route map and bus route map from their children's school. Families are encouraged to walk to school together at least once to discover the best route and to discuss safety issues such as looking both ways at intersections, staying on well-lit pathways, and handling potentially dangerous situations.
Evaluation and Engineering
A core element of the program is the evaluation of existing safety conditions around all 32 Arlington County schools, and the engineering (design) and construction necessary to remedy the problems the evaluations uncover.
Early in the program, a team from the Arlington Police Department and Department of Public Works met with principals and other administrators to conduct safety evaluations of conditions at each school.
The school site visits identified more than 200 physical measures that were needed near the schools. Many of the improvements involved improving signage and markings at crosswalks and in school zones. Some involved adjustments to School and County operating policies and matters including snow removal, on-street parking and traffic signal timing.
Some of the prescribed remedies could be quickly and inexpensively attended to - and they were. These included, for example, the installation of new school zone flashing signals at about 10 schools; the relocation of parking and drop-off zones and clearance of overgrown vegetation at many. The Police Department, based on the evaluation, also initiated the use of crossing guards at all four of the County's middle schools. The guards were also given additional resources, such as cell phones, to help them with traffic control and to report potential dangers.
A list of longer-term projects also was developed--primarily traffic calming measures. All told, over one and a half million dollars of County funds have been directed to the Safe Routes to Schools projects. As of March 2006, all but a handful of the 27 planned street improvements (including the construction of new sidewalks, pedestrian refuge islands and curb extensions or nubs) have been completed. Visit the Safe Routes to Schools projects page for details. Implementation of additional projects will take place as funding is allocated, or as new schools are built or renovated.
In short, Safe Routes concepts have taken hold in Arlington County, and are very much a part of how the County's streets, sidewalks and school properties are designed and built.
Enforcement
Policies that address pedestrian safety issues are critical but only effective where enforced. In Arlington, enforcement efforts by County Police and Sheriff's Departments have focused on speeding, illegal turning, illegal parking, and security near County schools. The County's "speed trailers," which provide drivers with visual readout of their actual travel speeds, have been employed more frequently near schools, reducing the incidence of speeding on many roads.
Encouragement: the extra "e"
The final element of the Safe Routes to Schools project is encouragement. Students in Arlington Public Schools learn about how walking and biking to school provides them with healthy exercise and greater awareness of their environment. They also learn that reducing the volume of student drop-off traffic at school leads to greater safety for everyone. For additional information about Arlington's Safe Routes to Schools program:
- Safe Routes to Schools Construction Projects Status List
- Arlington Civic Federation's files in .pdf format, last updated Dec. 2000 that provide program background and description and an initial list of proposed projects.
- "Arlington Citizen" article from Fall 2002 about Walk Your Children to School Day.
- Safety Patrol Summer Camp Each year, the County's Police Department offers training for future youth safety patrols, grades 4 through 6.
