Streetsblog San Francisco

At an early morning rally before school started today, students from San Francisco's Longfellow Elementary School in the Excelsior district gathered to celebrate Walk to School Day and the launch of the Safe Routes to School program.

While the adults present may have been excited about the policy details - a $500,000 grant for five schools this year, 15 schools next year, and an opportunity to make strides in encouraging walking and biking to school - the children got the message loud and clear that walking, especially with hordes of peers, is fun business.

Warming up with a call-and-response cheer of "Longfellow: WALKS!", students welcomed guest speakers to the celebration, including Jacquie Chavez, co-founder of Walk to Win Wednesdays and mother of a first-grader at Longfellow.

"Remember, it's good for you, it's good for your community, it's good for the planet. Get out and walk to school," said Chavez. "It's actually pretty fun. I do it every day, not just on Wednesdays." Chavez organizes a similar walk every Wednesday: "I hope see you out there too," she told the crowd.

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Walking to school may seem like an unfortunate casualty of the San Francisco Unified School District's school assignment system, which aims to desegregate schools by prioritizing diversity over proximity when placing students. But as the school district launches its Safe Routes to School program tomorrow in conjunction with Walk to School Day, there is hope that schools could significantly increase walking and bicycling to and from school even with the dispersed student bodies most schools have.

Compared to other areas, like Marin County, where the Safe Routes to Schools program originated in 2000, San Francisco has unique challenges, said Ana Validzic, who coordinates the Safe Routes to School program for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. "We're much more urban and we're very diverse, and one of the things that people struggle with is the school assignment system," said Validzic. "When they hear about the school assignment system, they sort of just shut down and think that we cannot promote walking and biking because children may not be assigned to a school within walking distance."

While San Francisco doesn't have neighborhood schools designed to draw primarily from within a mile or two radius, most of its schools still do have a significant percentage of students who live nearby. Walking or biking might not work for everyone, but "it's reasonable to ask at least some students to walk and bike," said Validzic.

The five San Francisco schools participating in the Safe Routes to School program this year - Bryant in the Mission District, George Washington Carver in Bayview, Longfellow in the Excelsior, Sunnyside, and Sunset - were chosen because each has a majority of students who live within a mile from school.

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As schools across the country open their doors for another year, Robert Ping of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership says students are increasingly facing "bans" against walking and biking to campus. Network member BikePortland.org reports:

"It’s pervasive throughout the country and we’re hearing about it more and more,” [Ping] said. The problem, according to Ping, is that many school principals and administrators feel that biking and walking to school is simply unsafe. They are concerned about being held liable for anything that happens during the trip to and/or from school.

In addition to studying the current scope of the problem, the Safe Routes National Partnership is putting together a team of legal experts who will craft a legal statement directed at school principals, outlining why improving biking and walking options will not increase their liability exposure. They hope the legal statement will also help allay the fears that lead to bike ban policies in the first place.

Though, as Ping points out, principals can't actually stop students from walking and biking, they can use their influence to discourage it. Administrators can also deny students a decent place to store their bikes during the school day. But if the issue is safety and liability, what about those high school parking lots?

Ping said one safe routes advocate he heard from countered a bike ban in their community by asking the principal whether or not he felt liable for kids who drive to school. “That’s a great way to push back on this idea.”

In a somewhat related post featured on the Network today, Car Free With Kids sings the praises of raising a toddler on transit. Also: The Overhead Wire notes light rail progress in Houston, while Streetsblog LA finds controversy over one Metro rail line; Gateway Streets maps "desire paths" in St. Louis's Forest Park; and NY Examiner analyzes another case of motorist-on-cyclist violence, this time in Staten Island.

All morning I've been asking myself (and some others) why kids riding bicycles to school is a pressworthy event. Don't kids always ride bikes to school or have we become so car-dependent that even this sancrosanct part of being young and carefree is a thing of the past?  Unfortunately, the latter is the case, as no school in San Francisco sees even 5 percent of walking and bicycling trips to school.

Today's inaugural Bike to School Day is the start of a shift for the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to promote cycling as a healthy and environmentally sound way to get to school.

"The school district has recently started promoting biking to school as a way to commute efficiently, however they haven't done an actual event to promote biking to school before this," said SFBC Program Manager Marc Caswell.  "Today is the day we're actually going to reward students that want to ride to school."

Nik Kaestner, Director of Sustainability for the SFUSD, said the district is now focusing on expanding bicycling through its Safe Routes to Schools educational efforts.

"The more that this becomes commonplace, the more we change culture, the more people will come around," he said. "I think that’s the goal around the district. If you're just throwing facts at them, I don't think that makes a difference. I think it needs to be cool."

Kaestner relayed an anecdote from this morning at Roosevelt Middle School, where a kid came up to him after seeing the bagels and juice that kids who cycled enjoyed and said he needed to ride next year. "It's nice to see the kids that are biking are being rewarded for doing it and other kids are taking notice."

When asked why the walking and bicycling numbers are so low in San Francisco, Kaestner suggested that many parents fear for their child's safety on the street.  "There's a general fear of what might happen to their kid if they walk or bike. They think putting them in steel boxes is safer."

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