Safe Routes to School

Updated September 29, 2022

What's Happening Now?

Safe Routes to School supports Seattle’s Vision Zero goals

The National Center for Safe Routes to School has named Seattle as the 2022 recipient of the U.S. Vision Zero for Youth Leadership Award.

“This Award recognizes the commitment of Seattle’s local government, its transportation department and public school system to lead community-engaged, equity-focused efforts geared toward making a great impact on walking and biking safety for its youngest residents.” - Nancy Pullen-Seufert, Director, National Center for Safe Routes to School, UNC Highway Safety Research Center.

Since 2014, there have been no deaths among children under 18 walking and biking on Seattle’s streets.

Still, as of September 28th, 16 people have lost their lives this year in Seattle while traveling on City streets. These were our neighbors. They were someone’s child, someone’s partner, someone’s sibling or parent. Our hearts are heavy for each person who has passed. With this grief also comes a shared affirmation of our support for safe streets and to our Vision Zero efforts. Efforts that we know are long-term and require a collective, systemic approach to change. In the forthcoming top-to-bottom review of Seattle’s Vision Zero efforts, key learnings from the Safe Routes to School program will be top of mind.

Please review our Youth Safety Report to learn more about safety for kids walking, biking, and rolling in Seattle.

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:

Communities of color
Low-income communities
Immigrant and refugee communities
People experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity
The LGBTQIA+ community
Girls

It is our Vision Zero goal to end traffic deaths and serious injuries on city streets by 2030

Equity is foundational to Seattle’s Vision Zero and Safe Routes to School program, whose goal is to eliminate racial disparities and achieve racial equity

It's our Climate Change vision to make 90% of personal trips zero emission by 2030

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.

How Can SRTS Help You?