Press Releases

For Immediate Release

Bay Area Students Step Forward for Walk-to-School Week

Safe Routes to School Can Boost Health, Ease Congestion

Contacts:

John Goodwin
510.817.5862

Randy Rentschler
510.817.5780

OAKLAND, Calif., September 30, 2004...Just weeks after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger —a one-time “Kindergarten Cop” — signed into law Senate Bill 1087, which extends California’s “Safe Routes to School” construction program for another three years, students and teachers at dozens of Bay Area schools will take part in International Walk to School Week, October 4 through 8. They will join forces with millions of others across the United States and around the world to perform the simple, healthy and increasingly rare act of walking or bicycling to school.

Besides encouraging adults and children to walk or bike to school together, the goals of Walk-to-School Week include enhancing health through increased physical activity, improving air quality and the environment by reducing car trips to school, and advocating for programs such as Safe Routes to School that help create more walkable communities.

“The timing of Walk-to-School Week is terrific,” said Randy Rentschler, manager of Legislation and Public Affairs for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), which supported SB 1087. “It not only comes close on the heels of the Safe Routes to School extension but it’s near the start of the school year, so it can help establish healthy travel habits. Walk-to-School Week reminds us that getting to school hasn’t always meant climbing into a car.”

The percentage of school trips made on foot or on bike has been shrinking steadily for years. U.S. Census data show that walking accounted for only 17 percent of all trips to school in the Bay Area in 2000, and less than 2 percent of school trips were made on bikes. That’s a marked decline from 1990, when an MTC survey reported that 21 percent of Bay Area school trips were made on foot and 4 percent by bike.

As part of its commitment to ease Bay Area congestion and improve regional air quality, MTC is working to reverse this trend.

“School trips make up 28 percent of all the travel in the Bay Area from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.,” explained Rentschler. “That’s second only to work trips. Reducing the number of car trips to school can make a big difference in easing the morning commute.”

California’s Safe Routes to School program, which had been set to expire Dec. 31, will now extend through 2007. The program provides $20 million to $25 million annually for sidewalk improvements, traffic calming and speed reduction, pedestrian/bicycle crossing improvements, on-street bicycle lanes and other safety measures near schools around the state.

More information about International Walk-to-School Week is available on the Web at: www.walktoschool-usa.org.

MTC is the regional transportation planning, financing, and coordinating agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area.

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