A Regional Agency-Locality Patterning and Benchmarking Twin Approach for Safe-Routes-to-School Programs’ Implementation

Safe-Routes-to-School (SRTS) programs have gained national and international interest in the past decade to address the sharp decline in the percentage of grades K–8 students that use active modes, i.e., walking or biking, to travel to school. Such programs do not typically lack policy guidelines on implementation management at the high federal or state agencies’ level. However, at a finer scale of regional agencies or localities, SRTS programs suffer from immaturity in the state of practice, especially in the preliminary efforts to initiate the program. In this paper, concerted efforts of agency (Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization) and locality (city of Hampton) will be presented to showcase best practices on patterning and benchmarking school zones for programs’ implementation management. Guidelines on data collection and acquisition, processing and key performance indicators’ development, multi-criteria evaluation, and ranking will be presented to fill this practice gap. Also, partnering lessons learned on identification of opportunities to fund those programs, like the Transportation Alternatives Set-Aside Program, will be discussed at the conclusion section.