No association between Safe Routes to school programs and school-age pedestrian or bicyclist collisions in New York State

Highlights

• Change in collision were measured before and after SRTS.

• School-age collision not reduced near schools with SRTS.

• Not evident in SRTS intervention's effects on collision reduction.

Abstract

Introduction

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs aim to promote children's active school commuting and to improve traffic safety around schools. Evaluation studies mostly have focused on travel modal shift to active modes. However, traffic safety improvement has been less studied, although it was one of the most important program goals and it could be equally important to policy makers and practitioners. We aim to evaluate whether schools participating in a SRTS program have safety improvement.

Methods

Using a two-group (case-control) pretest-posttest study design, we analyzed SRTS funding in 2008 and 2013 in New York State. Analysis of Covariance models were established to examine if SRTS funding was associated with changes in collision outcomes with adjusting school demographics, area-based socioeconomic characteristics, and built environments around schools. Collision outcomes were vehicle collision count and risk (count adjusted by traffic volume) around school before and after SRTS funding.

Results

In total, 2363 schools were examined. We found that the 2013 SRTS programs were not significantly associated with a decrease in collision involving school-age pedestrians or bicyclists occurring within a 0.5-mile distance from schools during school hours.

Conclusions

The 2013 SRTS funding was not associated with collision reduction, suggesting no evident effect of SRTS on collision reduction among school-age pedestrians and bicyclists.

Introduction

In the United States, pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities have increased since 2008. In 2017, there were 5977 pedestrian deaths, of which nearly 19% were children aged 14 or younger. Pedestrian deaths accounted for 16% of all traffic fatalities in 2017, increasing from 12% in 2008 (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2019). A Canadian study found that about 50% of child pedestrian collisions occurred during school commuting times around schools (Warsh et al., 2009). The number of bicyclist deaths also increased from 708 in 2008 to 840 in 2016. Poorly designed streets may produce preventable pedestrian and bicyclist collisions (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2018). Safe street environments for all modes and all street users are especially important for vulnerable populations including children. School-age children are less likely to walk or bike in their neighborhoods if there are many collisions (Liu and Mendoza, 2014). Traffic safety concern is one of the main reasons for parents not allowing their children to walk or bike to/from schools (McDonald and Aalborg, 2009).

For safer walking and bicycling and more appealing school commuting modes, a federal program, the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program was initiated by the US Congress with the 2005 federal transportation bill (Fischer, 2005). Between 2005 and 2012, a total of $1.2 billion was budgeted for the SRTS program including infrastructure enhancement (e.g., sidewalk improvement and pedestrian safety countermeasures) and non-infrastructure interventions (e.g., education, enforcement) (McDonald et al., 2014). The SRTS program initially allocated funding to State transportation departments (DOTs). In 2012, 2015, new transportation bills were passed to combine the existing stand-alone SRTS funding into general walking and bicycling transportation program funding streams. Under the old funding stream, most SRTS funding was awarded in 2008 and 2013. Afterwards, the DOT has had no dedicated funding specifically for SRTS. The SRTS program must compete against other transportation projects (The Safe Routes Partnership, n.d.). Consequently, it is necessary and critical to evaluate whether the SRTS program (when it was a stand-alone program with dedicated funding) had significant impacts and intended outcomes using a pretest-posttest design with longitudinal collision, demographic and built environment data.

Previous studies aiming to evaluate the impacts of SRTS have mostly focused on students' travel mode change (changes in walking and biking rates to/from school). They showed that SRTS slightly increased children's walking or bicycling. According to a national SRTS survey report, 5227 schools participating in SRTS in 2007–2013 had a 3% increase in walking and bicycling (National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2015). Some studies found a moderate increase in walking (from 9.8% to 14.2%) among 53 SRTS schools in four states (Stewart et al., 2014) and a 5–20% increase in walking or biking to/from 14 schools in Oregon after SRTS interventions (McDonald et al., 2013). A systematic review paper summarized that SRTS interventions had a small impact on travel mode change (Cohen's d < 0.33) (Chillón et al., 2011).

Another important outcome that needs to be evaluated as part of SRTS impacts is the improvement in traffic safety. However, there are only very few studies that examined longitudinal changes in pedestrian or bicyclist injury associated with SRTS programs, mostly published by the same research group (Dumbaugh and Frank, 2007). DiMaggio and Li (2013) found that the rate of pedestrian injury decreased by 44% for youth aged 5 to 19 in census tracts with SRTS treatments in New York City, while rates were unchanged for census tracts without SRTS (DiMaggio and Li, 2013). Another study analyzed quarterly traffic crash data in Texas to assess the effect of the SRTS program on school-age pedestrian and bicyclist injuries and found that the rates of pedestrian and bicyclist injuries between pre- and post-SRTS periods declined 42.5% (DiMaggio et al., 2015). A recent study found that SRTS intervention was associated with a 23% reduction in pedestrian and bicyclist injuries (DiMaggio et al., 2016). To our knowledge, these are the only published academic papers on SRTS evaluation that specifically focuses on the change in pedestrian or bicyclist safety improvement, even though it was one of the SRTS goals. Other than them, the association between SRTS and collision reduction was rarely tested. Another research gap is that traffic volume, an important and accurate measure of exposure when studying collisions, was not accounted for when pedestrian or bicyclist collision risks were analyzed (Srinivasan et al., 2016; Stewart, 2011).

This study aims to examine whether school-age pedestrian or bicyclist collisions (with traffic volume adjusted) were reduced around schools after SRTS funding, using SRTS eligible schools for 2008 and 2013 SRTS funding in New York State and using a two-group (case-control) pretest-posttest study design.