By Mat Thomas

Jason Serafino-Agar, Safe Routes to School Coordinator, teaches a young bicyclist.

This Thursday, April 15^th, the Safe Routes to School program will shift into high gear with the second annual Bike to School Day , a citywide event to introduce San Francisco students to the joys of cruising to and from class in self-propelled style. Featuring Bike Trains led by parent chaperones, the 2009 event drew more than 500 students from 25 participating schools, and SF Bicycle Coalition hopes to double those numbers this year.

“Biking and walking to school is not actually a new idea,” Serafino-Agar points out, “just an old one that our culture has temporarily forgotten.” Only 40 years ago, almost half the students in the U.S. walked or biked to school, but now less than 15 percent do. “Unfortunately, children who are only driven to school in motor vehicles are missing out on the formative experience of freedom, independence, empowerment, and yes, pure fun, that is part of growing up behind a solid pair of handlebars” says Serafino-Agar.  “Promoting biking also enables adults to teach kids vital lessons about the importance of regular exercise, and how our transportation choices impact the environment.”

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition believes that proactive youth outreach is the key to unlocking the bicycle’s potential as the go-to vehicle for everyday transportation, because kids are absorbing life lessons today that will shape their attitudes and behaviors for decades to come. Among the most passionate practitioners of this philosophy is Jason Serafino-Agar, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s coordinator for the Safe Routes to School program, which engages community leaders, teachers and parents in an effort to encourage more children (including those with disabilities) to walk and bike to school.

A Closer Look at Safe Routes to Schools
Safe Routes to School has a long and storied international history that goes back to a movement originating in 1970s Denmark that garnered rapid success and spread quickly around the world. Just a year after Safe Routes to School first landed stateside in the Bronx, N.Y. in 1997, Marin County initiated one of the earliest pilot programs in the U.S. (which Serafino-Agar also worked with in 2004-05) fueled by a $50,000 grant from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Today more than 5,440 schools have Safe Routes to School programs funded by over $400 million in federal grants.

But only a handful of these schools are in San Francisco—that’s because Safe Routes to School started here in September 2009 on a two-year $500,000 grant from the federal government and Caltrans. The program, which originated with Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Shape Up San Francisco project and the success of International Walk to School Day is led by the SF Department of Public Health with support from a broadly-based coalition, including the SF Bicycle Coalition; SF Unified School District; SF Municipal Transportation Agency; SF Police Department; and Department of Children, Youth and Families (with additional support from the SF Unified School District Office of Sustainability and Presidio YMCA Bike Program). It launched for the 2009-10 school year at five elementary schools—Bryant (Mission District), George Washington Carver (Bayview), Longfellow (Excelsior), Sunnyside (Sunnyside), and Sunset (Outer Sunset) that collectively serve approximately 1,800 students.

These initial schools were chosen for the program because more than two-thirds of their students live within a mile of their school, making biking or walking to class a real possibility for most of them. Ten additional institutions will join the program during the 2010-11 school year for a grand total of 15 schools (and applications from interested schools for these 10 slots will be accepted this spring). The Bicycle Coalition hopes San Francisco is awarded additional grant money so they can continue expanding and improving the program at these initial schools, and implement it at additional schools into 2012 and beyond.

The Five E’s: Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, Engineering and Evaluation
The Safe Routes to School program encompasses “Five E’s” that define its structure and scope—Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, Engineering, and Evaluation. Serafino-Agar’s responsibilities as SF Bicycle Coalition’s Safe Routes to School program coordinator are manifold, but foremost among them is educating students. Specifically, he visits schools to teach age-appropriate pedestrian safety to second graders, and bike safety to fourth graders. In the first stage of his presentations, Serafino-Agar relies on instruction and discussion, but students generally find the second part much more exciting—because that’s when they get to leave the classroom as a group, and apply what they’ve just learned directly to the real-life sidewalks and streets surrounding their school grounds.

“On the surface, we train youth to be safe on the road, like always wearing a helmet, how to spot and stop at sidewalk edges, and to look both ways before crossing the street,” he notes. “But on a deeper level, we’re teaching independent decision-making skills—and at every step of the way, students learn about the consequences of different transportation choices, and their personal responsibility to choose wisely.”

Solutions For Our Future
Biking or walking to school can have wide-ranging individual and social  impacts. Today, the obesity rate among children aged 6 to 11 in the U.S. is nearly 20 percent, which is almost triple what it was just two decades ago (Childhood Obesity Stats). Serafino-Agar maintains that biking and walking to school are two easy ways to combat this national obesity epidemic. “A child burns 200 to 400 calories an hour biking on flat roads—imagine the health benefits if they could do that every day, or twice a day to and from school?”

It is estimated that over 20-25 percent of morning traffic is comprised of cars driven by parents taking their kids to school. “Imagine what would happen if we took one out of every four cars off the road during rush hour,” says Serafino-Agar. “There would be less traffic congestion and shorter commute times, and those lines of cars stretching down the block outside of schools wouldn’t be quite so long—leaving less air pollution around school yards, and therefore fewer kids suffering asthma attacks.”

“The momentum created by grassroots bike advocates has reached the highest levels of government—all the way up to First Lady Michelle Obama, whose Let’s Move initiative lists biking to school as one of the top 10 healthy activities for kids,” Serafino-Agar concludes. “The common denominator that unites people around Safe Routes to School is that everyone cares about their children and their children’s future. Really, it’s hard to be against a program with a proven track record of improved health, energy conservation, and environmental sustainability.”

To inquire about volunteering for the Safe Routes to School program, email Jason Serafino-Agar at jason@sfbike.org. For more information on Thursday’s Bike to School day, visit biketoschoolday.org.