Bay Area Safe Routes to School
Safe Routes to School programs create safer routes for walking or biking to school. They offer training, education and encouragement to students and parents on safe ways to travel by foot or by wheel.
About one out of every seven Bay Area residents is a student from kindergarten age through high school. That’s more than a million kids!
Short car trips to and from schools make up a big share of Bay Area travel — and a big source of the region’s greenhouse gas emissions.
MTC aims to trim the number of these car trips by making it safer and easier for students, families and teachers to walk or bike to school instead.
MTC’s One Bay Area Grant (OBAG) program funds the Regional Safe Routes to School grant program, which taps federal money to provide about $5 million each year for grants to cities, counties and county transportation agencies to fund:
- Safe Routes to School program implementation
- Direct pedestrian and bicyclist safety training and education programs for K-12 students
- Outreach and encouragement for students and families
- Infrastructure safety audits around schools
MTC’s Spare the Air Youth program educates and inspires Bay Area youth and their families to walk, bicycle, carpool and take transit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
How we get where we’re going affects everything from fitness to traffic congestion to air pollution. Visit the Vital Signs website to see how the Bay Area is getting around.
The Regional Safe Routes to School grant program supplements state and federal funding in the Bay Area. These grants fund Safe Routes to School programs in all nine counties and in many cities.
Partners include:
The goal of the Safe Routes to School program is simple: Remove barriers that may prevent students from walking or biking to school.
To address this, MTC funds two supporting regional programs as part of Spare the Air Youth that provide students and their families with critical bike safety education.
- The Bay Area BikeMobile delivers free bike repair and bike mechanics education to schools, libraries and other public spaces
- Family Biking Workshops teach parents with small children how to ride around town safely as a family
To learn more about these bike safety education programs, visit the Spare the Air Youth Program Regional Activities page.