Focused Topic: Safe Routes Programs
You may sometimes hear about Safe Routes to Schools or Safe Routes for Seniors, but what is it really?
This is another installment of a semi-regular segment we’re calling Focused Topic where we do a deep-dive into a particular topic which may be of interest. This time, we’ll be focusing on the Safe Routes Programs.
Hayward Safe Routes Programs
Our local government has spent the majority of its time, like all of its contemporaries, in the last 80 years making things as easy as possible for automobiles of various stripes and, by consequence, horrible for everything else. Hayward itself is a car-centric City, evidenced by its enormous geographic size and relative low-density (over half of the land area designated for residential use is earmarked for Single Family Homes, but we still manage to cram 160,000 people within city limits).
And while this isn’t really a problem for those of us who have the privilege of owning one or more personal automobiles, there are two big groups who are often unable to drive but are still thought of fondly: children and seniors.1
One of the things that our regional government at the County level has decided to do is try to make things better for these two groups of people with different Safe Routes programs. They’re not really related in anything but name, but the main idea of them is to make it easier for these two groups to get around when they can’t drive. But this general goal and the reality of the programs are quite a long way apart, as we’ll soon see.
Safe Routes to Schools
Safe Routes to Schools (SR2S) is an initiative that has a lot of different levels and they’re not all related. There’s the super-regional level where the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), which covers the 9-county Bay Area, has a Bay Area Safe Routes to School program. There’s the regional/county level of the Alameda County Transportation Commission (ACTC) Safe Routes to School Program. There’s finally the local level of the City of Hayward Safe Routes to School Program. They’re all related, but it’s worth looking at them each individually before looking at how they work, or don’t, together.
MTC Safe Routes to Schools
We can start at the highest level, with the MTC’s Safe Routes to Schools program. As you can see from the url, this is housed under their “Climate Protection” bucket of funding. This program comes in the shape of the One Bay Area Grant (OBAG) where the MTC gets about $5,000,000 each year to distribute to cities, counties, and country transportation agencies. This is pocket change relative to the MTC’s budget and the scope of the issue.2
However, even these limited funds are only for certain projects, and it’s a lot more broad than you think. They 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
Of these three things, only one of them actually deals with the realities of a dangerous built environment. And before you point to bullet four up there, an infrastructure audit is paying a consultant to come in and tell the City what it should do around a school, not actually do the thing. It’s paying to develop the plan, but not implement it.
Also, how the MTC approaches the problem from a climate perspective is problematic. While encouraging bicycling and alternative modes of transportation is a real climate issue, framing it as a Spare the Air Youth issue places the onus on the individual to “spare the air” for the youth as opposed to a structural issue with how we’ve designed our urban environment since WWII. Family bike workshops, while great, aren’t going to get parents out of their cars when their school is over a mile away. Free bike repair is great, but if there’s no safe place to ride them, then people need to drive somewhere where it is.
And that doesn’t even touch the fact that $5,000,000 per year across nine counties, even if it was dedicated entirely to infrastructure improvements, is not going to make a significant difference in the vehicle use of parents or students.
ACTC Safe Routes to Schools
At the County level, things are much the same. The ACTC Safe Routes to Schools Program is a lot more robust, but it can be a bit misleading in what it’s really doing. There are two parts: Funding and Programming.
The funding portion is, much like the MTC, mostly doling out a hilariously small amount of money3 to various cities and unincorporated areas for minor infrastructure improvements.
For the programming portion, there are a lot of different services which ACTC offers which focus, as expected, on personal responsibility. For example, there’s a Bike Blender where students can use a pedal-powered blender, or a BikeMobile which is a mobile bike repair service that moves around the County, or bike curriculum and workshops and other things to essentially teach people how to manage the dangers of our car-centric environment without actually addressing the underlying issue.
All of this, however, trickles down to the local municipal level.
Hayward Safe Routes to Schools
The City of Hayward Safe Routes to Schools Program (SR2S) is the one that happens at the local level. Our Transportation Division (part of Public Works) handles the nuts and bolts of this because it’s all, technically, transportation related. But it also impacts, as you might imagine, the Hayward Unified School District (HUSD). And having to involve two different agencies makes things more complicated, and usually more modest.
The main thing that the SR2S program has done in Hayward is a lot of assessments. According to the page linked above, they’ve done assessments on 14 different schools:
Bowman Elementary
Bret Harte Middle School
Burbank Elementary
Cesar Chaves Middle School
Faith Ringgold Elementary
Impact Academy (charter)
Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School
Park Elementary
Southgate Elementary
Tennyson High School
Tyrell Elementary
Winton Middle School
Longwood Elementary
The page alleges that the assessments have been done for “all 14 schools in the City”, though since Hayward High is missing from the list, I’m not sure if I trust that particular assessment.4 These assessments were mostly conducted between 2015 (Bowman Elementary) and 2020 (Impact Academy), though there’s a chance that the assessment for Longwood Elementary was done in 2010.
There’s a pretty big spread on how detailed the assessments are, with some of them being a single page and others being as long as 16. The recommendations of the assessment are, for the most part, disappointingly minor. There’s a lot of focus on signage and painted curb extensions and repainting crosswalks. There’s been some recommendations for bike lanes, but if you take a look at one example, here’s the one-pager for Burbank Elementary.
The recommendations only extend to the single block from the campus, and of the 9 recommendations, fully 6 of them involve paint (painting curb extensions, painting new crosswalks, painting the word STOP a little further back from the crosswalk), 2 of them include trimming hedges, and one is installing a new entrance gate on the back half of the school.
I understand that there’s not a lot of money, and that in and of itself is an issue, but thinking so small is a huge problem. This is not how it become safer to walk to school. Installing a “School Warning” sign a block away isn’t going to stop people rolling through stop signs. An “advanced stop bar” isn’t going to encourage drivers to obey the speed limit. And trimming the hedges on the sidewalk isn’t going to make the actual walk to and from school notably safer.
And once the City has these assessments that the County is willing to pay for, it’s up to the City itself to fund the actual construction on its own dollar. So we get County money to pay a consultant to create assessments that the City is now tasked with paying for. Sometimes there is money from the County to do it, but definitely not often.
But let us take a look at the one program that did get funding: Cesar Chavez Middle School.
Cesar Chavez Middle School SR2S
This particular project got funding from the County to a tune of $162,000. The rest of the money also came from the County, but from their Measure BB5 funds. For a grand total of $324,000 the plan is to install the following:
A new sidewalk and fence, a right turn lane, and a new crosswalk
More crosswalks and painted curb extensions
More crosswalks and painted curb extensions with a flashing light sign
That’s it. Over $300,000 for what is mostly paint.
And please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that this isn’t helping. It is. But, much like our climate breakdown emergency, the scale of the problem is not matched by the scale of the response. This is tinkering around the edges and it’s also the only one of the 14 assessments that’s being implemented! And the assessment for Cesar Chavez was done 5 years ago!
And since every City and unincorporated area in Alameda County is competing for these funds, who knows how much Staff time was spent researching and writing the grant application. And we know even less how many were submitted that didn’t get funded.
Unfortunately, Safe Routes for Seniors is largely more of the same.
Safe Routes for Seniors (SR4S)
The City of Hayward Safe Routes for Seniors Program is sort of like the SR2S, but with more money. Over $2,366,000 is available for this program, covering 4 main intersections:
B St. and Montgomery Ave.
Hazel Ave/City Center Dr. and Foothill Blvd.
D St. and Watkins Ave.
A St. and Montgomery Ave.
All of this is covered by Measure BB funds, which means it was covered by a loan and is also coming from the same place most of the other projects are coming from. The City itself, clearly, doesn’t have the money on hand to deal with the problem and there’s lots of reasons for that, but that’s another story.
However, with this amount of money, substantive things are actually happening, which is nice! Unfortunately, it’s only happening at the intersections. For example, at City Center and Foothill (where the Mervyn’s HQ used to be), they’re removing lanes, but they’re right-turn lanes. They’ll also be making the medians bigger, which is good, but you’re still crossing up to 4 lanes of traffic just to get to the median. They’re also actually building out larger concrete corners, which is great, and adding in some trees. All of this is good.
Unfortunately, even this, I don’t think is going to be enough to convince senior citizens (or anyone else) to really enjoy walking across Foothill Blvd now. It’s still too big. And, again, this is all good stuff to do, but it’s just not enough! A seat in the middle of a 6 lane highway feels like your landlord giving you a gas mask in response to complaints about a gas leak: Yes, this does make it more safe, but it doesn’t fix the real problem!
So the short bit is that this is good, but it’s not working miracles. These programs are playing with the edges of the issues as best they can, but it’s a small bandage on a gaping wound. This is not enough to make things safer and more enjoyable to walk.
So What Do We Do?
Well, on an individual level not a whole lot directly. One thing you can do is tell your City Council members that you value walkability (they may not have money, but they do get to prioritize what we do have). You can bug your County Supervisor, Eliza Marquez, that you want more funding for walkability in Hayward. You can also bug your Congresspersons and tell them that our cities need money to make them safer to walk for seniors, students, and anyone else who is not a car.
Unfortunately, the real point is that the Federal Government has the bulk of the money right now and they’re busy spending it on killing people.6 And it’s up to us, working together as a community, to let them know that there are other, better things that money could be spent on.
If how a country spends its money is an indication of what it values, it’s pretty telling that we can find tens of billions of dollars bombing brown people on the other side of the planet, but cities have to fight against each other for less than the cost of this boat.
If you have a topic that you’d like covered in a Focused Topic piece, drop us a line at haywardherald@protonmail.com and we’ll get to researching it for you.
Sorry, teens.
To illustrate, if each county got an equal slice of this money, they’d get about $555,000 to divide amongst their own cities and unincorporated areas.
How hilariously small? For the SR2S project around Cesar Chavez Middle School, the ACTC kicked in a mere $162,000.
Since HUSD extends far beyond Hayward City Limits, it’d take some legwork to do the real count and I don’t have time for that just now.
You’ll notice a trend if you keep up with infrastructure projects that they’re always paid for by bond measures. We’re taking on debt, as tax payers, to fund these projects that struggle to make things livable.
The US Government spends more on Military funding than the next 10 nations military budgets combined.