Traffic safety, especially the speed of cars around schools, is one of the biggest barriers to walking and biking to school reported by parents. Reducing the speed of traffic around schools is a step toward making routes to school safer and encouraging families to walk and bike. The upcoming Safe Routes to School Webinar will highlight the strategies used by two communities to successfully slow vehicle speeds around schools.
Scott Bricker, executive director of America Walks, will review relevant research around speed and pedestrian and bicyclist safety and provide a general overview of steps your community can take to slow vehicle speeds around schools. Then, Elizabeth Stampe, director of Walk San Francisco, will discuss how her organization worked with the city’s transportation department to enforce an existing state law and help to reduce speed limits around 181 schools. Finally, Mark Lear, from the Portland Bureau of Transportation, will describe the city’s development of a neighborhood greenways network with speed limits of 20 mph. He’ll present some basic design elements of Portland’s greenways and discuss how they built a diverse community coalition to achieve their goals.
This webinar is part of the Safe Routes to School Webinar Series, developed by America Walks and the National Center for Safe Routes to School. For more information, please contact Michelle Gulley at firstname.lastname@example.org.