Safe Routes to School and Traffic Pollution: Get Children Moving and Reduce Exposure to Unhealthy Air

The federal Safe Routes to School program seeks to get more children to safely walk and bicycle to and from school. Through the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) federal transportation law, Congress has provided approximately $1.1 billion for Safe Routes to School since 2005. The vast majority of funds are spent on infrastructure improvements near schools, such as sidewalks, paths, crosswalks, school zone signage and traffic calming. A small share of funding is for programs to teach children traffic safety skills, traffic enforcement around schools and encouragement activities. Clearly, there are strong benefits to implementing a Safe Routes to School program. Practitioners also need to understand and address possible risks to children from seeking to increase their rates of walking and bicycling to school. One potential area of risk is exposure to traffic-related air pollution (called traffic pollution in this report), but it has been under-examined thus far. This publication seeks to narrow that knowledge gap by examining the following: 1, The health impacts on children from exposure to traffic pollution; 2. How Safe Routes to School programs can potentially impact children’s exposure to traffic pollution; 3. Strategies and practice approaches that can mitigate exposure to traffic pollution. Because Safe Routes to School focuses on increasing walking and bicycling, thereby decreasing the number of vehicles around schools that are emitting traffic pollution, there is a natural link between efforts to increase walking and bicycling and efforts to reduce traffic pollution. However, it is important for Safe Routes to School practitioners to be aware of the complexities of how traffic pollution works so that they can minimize children’s exposure. Some air quality strategies and practices are relatively simple to incorporate into Safe Routes to School programs, such as school district no idling zones or selecting low-traffic routes for the walk route to school. Other practices, such as retrofitting school buses with cleaner burning fuels or siting schools within neighborhoods will require greater resources and leadership. It is the authors' hope that this resource guide will help Safe Routes to School practitioners be more intentional about reducing the potential risks of exposure to traffic pollution so that participating children and families can be physically active in cleaner air.