Crafting a Safe Routes to School (SRTS) Candidate Index for Philadelphia

CPLN 6720 Final Project - Henry Sywulak-Herr

Introduction

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is a movement originating in Denmark in the 1970s, whose implementation of aggressive complete streets and speed-reduction programs led to a 40% reduction in child pedestrian fatalities over the following decade (Safe Routes Partnership, 2025). While the first informal instance of SRTS implementation took place in the United States in 1997, the federal government lent concrete support to the program in 2005 as part of the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users Act (SAFETEA-LU). The act originally allocated $612 million from FY2005-2009 to promote safer transportation for K-8 students across the United States by funding improvement projects. These were broken down into infrastructure and non-infrastructure projects (USDOT, 2005):

  • Infrastructure Projects (70-90% of funds): Changes to the physical environment around schools, including the construction/improvement of sidewalks, traffic calming and speed-reduction measures, installing bicycle lane and parking infrastructure, and diverting traffic from streets near schools.
  • Non-Infrastructure Projects (10-30% of funds): Primarily education and policy initiatives including public awareness campaigns, data gathering and analysis, funding volunteer groups who promoted SRTS goals, and training for students, parents, and school staff on walking and biking safety.

By 2013, SRTS projects in the US were found to have decreased the annual pedestrian injury rate for school-aged children by 33%, or 44% when isolating school hours (defined as weekdays, 07:00-09:00 and 14:00-16:00) (DiMaggio and Li, 2013). Coupled with the rise in Vision Zero initiatives across the country that broadly aim to reduce - and eventually eliminate - traffic-related pedestrian fatalities and injuries, SRTS programs have become a key component of city transportation planning in major cities across the country. Philadelphia’s own Vision Zero Action Plan 2030 released in November 2025 highlights numerous successes of the past decade related to SRTS programs, including how over 400 students and caregivers rode in the nationally organized October 2025 Bike, Walk, & Roll to School event: double the number of participants in 2024 (Vision Zero Philadelphia, 2025; OTIS, 2025). The Vision Zero Action Plan 2030 aims to continue to reduce pedestrial fatalities and injuries in the city throughout the next five years, and highlights numerous goals and action items related to school safety that broadly fall into three categories (Vision Zero Philadelphia, 2025):

  • Active Enforcement: Expand Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) in school zones.
  • Policy & Education: Research and expand education programs that discuss “safe driving, walking, biking, and public transit practices” with students and community members.
  • Infrastructure: Installing traffic calming measures near high-pedestrian zones such as schools and recreation centers.

Despite the optimism surrounding these ambitious goals among policy makers and planners, Philadelphia must be critical how it decides to fund SRTS projects within the city in light of a federal administration that has historically and, at the time of this analysis, actively antagonistic towards complete/safe streets programs - particularly in blue states and cities - (Taylor, 2018; Wilson, 2025) and the increasingly precarious financial situation for transportation projects in Philadelphia as COVID relief funds expire and federal uncertainty mounts (Office of the Mayor, 2025). Education and community activism has an important role in the landscape of SRTS, but infrastructure projects remain one of the most effective and long-lasting ways of encouraging safe driving behaviors and removing the owness of safety from pedestrians (Lambert, 2024).

While community input and in-person site analysis remain essential for identifying specific candidate sites for SRTS infrastructure projects (Safe Routes Partnership, 2025), this analysis aims to provide a preliminary framework for identifying candidate routes that SRTS projects could be implemented.

Data & Methodology

This analysis will focus on creating index values for School District of Philadelphia public schools (K-12) within the boundary of Philadelphia that are assigned a catchment area. This index will be created from two primary elements: 1. Cost of Travel: index the qualitative safety cost of travel as a pedestrian or cyclist, focusing on average and peak vehicle volumes as indicators of danger to pedestrians utilizing the roadway.a 2. Demographics & Need: demographic data from the US Census Bureau will be used to assess the need for SRTS projects within school catchment areas, including factors such as population density, proportion of family households, and proportion of residents enrolled in school.

Road segment-level vehicle volume data will be normalized in order to generate an index for pedestrian/cyclist safety. Demographic variables will be obtained at the census tract level and interpolated to catchment area geometries in order to determine the characteristics of residents who go to each school, indicating the demand from each school for SRTS improvements. These indexed costs of travel and demand for each school catchment zone will then be calculated and combined using a Simple Additive Weighting approach - accomplished by min-max normalizing each variable and adding them together - to create an overall SRTS candidate index at the road segment level.

Data Sources