program in its tracks. With this in mind, The Safe Routes to School National Partnership and the National Center for safe Routes to School jointly developed a new tip sheet entitled “School Bicycling and Walking Policies: Addressing Policies that Hinder and Implementing Policies that Help.”  In addition to presenting a set of useful tips, this document also offers up the northwestern New Jersey community of Netcong as an example of a community that has effectively used SRTS to overturn a bicycling to school ban. To view the tip sheet and to read more about Netcong, see

http://www.saferoutesinfo.org/
resources/collateral/
barrier_policy_tip_sheet.pdf

 

Surveying for Success

A Safe Routes to School (SRTS) assessment can be a great way to help you evaluate walking and cycling conditions in your community and can vastly enhance the effectiveness of your SRTS program. Two SRTS assessment tools endorsed by the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) can help you quickly and easily measure how students get to and from school now and how they would like to do so if conditions permitted. The Student Arrival and Departure Tally Sheet is intended to quantify how students travel to and from school and can be conducted by the teacher in the classroom. The NJ Safe Routes to School Parent/Caregiver Survey is

 

more detailed and is meant to be completed at home by the parent or caregiver. It is provided in English and in Spanish in both paper and online formats. The results of these surveys will help you decide which actions would best meet the needs of your school now and in the future.

 

To make the data from these already easy to complete surveys even easier to use in your SRTS program, the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center (VTC) will tabulate and summarize the results of all Student Arrival and Departure Tally Sheets and NJ Safe Routes to School Parent/Caregiver Surveys completed by communities in New Jersey free of charge.

 

Communities throughout New Jersey have already benefited from this assessment. So far, schools in Camden, Freehold, Garfield, Milltown, New Brunswick, Netcong, Parsippany, Pennington, Ridgewood, Tenafly, and Trenton have completed these surveys and submitted them to VTC for analysis. Data from the surveys will be shared with NJDOT to help guide the priorities of the statewide SRTS program. So far, results from the surveys that have already been submitted have shown NJDOT that most parents in these communities don’t know whether their child’s school encourages bicycling and that “stranger danger” is constantly one of the top concerns affecting their decision about whether their child