Safe Routes to School

What We Do

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is a national movement to make it easier and safer for students to walk and bike to school. Our SRTS program is designed to improve safety in areas around schools and to encourage more kids to walk and bike. It's our goal for Seattle's school children to start their day by having fun, strengthening connections to their communities, improving physical and mental health, and arriving to school in time for breakfast and ready to learn. As part of our city's continued effort to end institutionalized racism and build a more equitable city, we are focused on extending the benefits of walking and biking to school to students in these groups:

2023 School Travel Tally Report

We work with Seattle Public Schools to conduct an annual travel tally in all elementary and K-8 schools, and the 2023 School Travel Tally Report is out! On average, Elementary schools across the city recorded an active transportation rate of 30%. This was 3% higher than the active transportation rate in 2015 and double the rate when the tally was first conducted in 2005! Read the report, view the summary, and learn more on our School Travel Tally page.

Made choice of students in 2023

5-Year Action Plan

Over the next 5 years, the SRTS Program will be led by a 5-Year Action Plan that lays out actions we'll take toward our goal of making it safer and easier for kids to walk and bike to school. It recommends specific, near-term strategies built around our program's seven E's: Equity, Environment, Education, Empowerment, Encouragement, Engineering, and Evaluation. Equity is infused into each of the other six categories as we continue our committment to taking a racial justice-driven approach to promoting more active commuting among students.

The Action Plan guides our investments by ranking all public and most private schools in Seattle. The rankings are based on where people walking or biking have had collisions, the races and ethnicities of students at each school, and numerical scores from the Pedestrian Master Plan that measure how inviting the streets around each school are for walking.

All children have the right to health, happiness and academic success regardless of race. For more detail, view the Safe Routes to School Action Plan Prioritization Process. To see how your school ranks, view the School Rankings for Walkway Projects and Crosswalk Projects.