Originally Posted by
davidmcowan
I'm looking to connect with other program people involved in Safe Routes to School for brainstorming and resource sharing. Anyone else out there?
I drive a school bus and it looks to me like the last 500' to school might be the most dangerous of all. Try observing traffic during drop off time at your local middle school. One of our local high schools had 4 serious traffic accidents at dismissal time during the first 4 school days this year.
The school busses themselves are pretty ungainly things. We have all kinds of mirrors to minimize blindspots but the mirrors themselves block our vision too. Any safe route to school should stay away from school busses.
Then there are all the other users. Parents don't always use the prescribed routes when they drop off their kids so they're zipping around from unexpected direstions (and the impatient ones really are zipping around). The kids who walk to school don't always use good judgement either. They seem to assume that everybody else is watching out for them and sees them regardless of what stupid thing they might be doing.
A very few kids in our school district bicycle to school. I'm sure that it's fewer than 50 in a school district of 10,000 or more students. I don't know what, if any, restrictions or rules there are concerning kids bicycling to school.