Active travel to school helps children be healthy. It also reduces air pollution and noise, as well as traffic congestion. To ensure that parents and teachers support and encourage walking, active school travel must be safe. This project is developing a School Walkability Score that WSDOT can use to rate all K-12 schools in Washington state. The score will help parents and teachers assess walkability levels around individual schools, and it will guide WSDOT staff in selecting strategies that will improve walkability and safety. The score will be derived from measures of the built and transportation environment around each school, such as sidewalks, crosswalks, traffic volumes, parks, and vacant lands. It will be validated by using school-level mode splits from Washington State Student Travel Surveys.
Principal Investigator: Anne Vernez Moudon, Urban Design and Planning, UW
Sponsor: PacTrans
Scheduled completion: August 2019