Achieving Sustainable Safety Through School Site Design - The St. Albert Community Initiative

In 2014, the City of St. Albert (City), Alberta, in conjunction with its partners in school traffic safety, commissioned a comprehensive review of traffic safety for its schools, using a holistic 4-E approach (Engineering-Education-Encouragement-Enforcement). Safe Journeys to School (SJ2S) was an initiative of the City, overseen by a Joint Public Steering Committee (JPSC). The objectives of the initiative were to: Gather information and feedback through extensive community engagement at all 26 St. Albert schools (including Elementary, Junior High and High School), towards identifying student traffic safety risks; Identify the most effective engineering, education, enforcement and encouragement strategies to mitigate the identified risks and enhance student travel safety among all schools; Develop recommendations and specific action plans to enhance student and school traffic safety at each of the 26 existing schools and two new school sites. Site visits were conducted to each and every school, during the pick-up or drop-off period, and during off-peak times. The site visits covered on-site characteristics, on-street characteristics and a review of the surrounding roadways. Notes were made of parking utilization, pedestrian facilities, traffic controls, driver and pedestrian behaviours and “close-calls”. Concerns raised during the community engagement were specifically investigated and reported on. This paper describes how the project galvanized the community. Secondly, it aims to convey the holistic, sustainable approach to school traffic safety taken by the City, both in terms of governance aspects and the shift to more active transportation modes. Third, it will demonstrate how the engagement and engineering activities were conducted in conjunction with one another to effectively address the issues. Finally, it will provide specific examples of how changes to the infrastructure, both on site and the adjacent roadway, can alleviate much of the traffic safety problems around schools or prevent them from occurring through effective design.