--- title: Safer routes to school. More kids walking and biking. 🚲 description: Discover how Love to Ride's SchoolWays methodology empowers families to share school travel safety concerns, helping create safer routes for children to walk and bike. image: https://blog.lovetoride.net/hubfs/Screenshot%202026-11-05%20at%2020.35.35.png --- [![Dark blue Love to Ride logo](https://blog.lovetoride.net/hubfs/LTR%20Logo%201%20Dark%20Blue%20on%20Transparent-100px.png "Dark blue Love to Ride logo")](https://blog.lovetoride.net/) [For Business](https://business.lovetoride.net/) [For Government](https://partners.lovetoride.net/) # The Love to Ride Blog ### Creating a more bike friendly world ## [Safer routes to school. More kids walking and biking. 🚲](https://blog.lovetoride.net/safer-routes-to-school.-more-kids-walking-and-biking) - by: Thomas Stokell - [Videos (34)](https://blog.lovetoride.net/tag/videos) - [Case Studies (30)](https://blog.lovetoride.net/tag/case-studies) - [Data (25)](https://blog.lovetoride.net/tag/data) - [Challenges (22)](https://blog.lovetoride.net/tag/challenges) - [Product (18)](https://blog.lovetoride.net/tag/product) - [Rider Stories (14)](https://blog.lovetoride.net/tag/rider-stories) - [Behaviour Change Theory (13)](https://blog.lovetoride.net/tag/behaviour-change-theory) - [Webinar (6)](https://blog.lovetoride.net/tag/webinar) All - Share - [![Facebook logo](https://blog.lovetoride.net/hubfs/blog_3_wow_design/Images/facebook_40px.png)](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.lovetoride.net%2Fsafer-routes-to-school.-more-kids-walking-and-biking) - [![Twitter logo](https://blog.lovetoride.net/hubfs/blog_3_wow_design/Images/twitter_40px.png)](https://www.twitter.com/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.lovetoride.net%2Fsafer-routes-to-school.-more-kids-walking-and-biking) - [![LinkedIn logo](https://blog.lovetoride.net/hubfs/blog_3_wow_design/Images/linkedin_40px.png)](https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://blog.lovetoride.net/safer-routes-to-school.-more-kids-walking-and-biking) - [![Email icon](https://blog.lovetoride.net/hubfs/blog_3_wow_design/Images/email_28px.png)](mailto:?subject=Awesome%20blog%20post%20on%20Love%20to%20Ride&body=Hi%20buddy,%20check%20out%20this%20interesting%20blog%20post%20I%20read%20on%20Love%20to%20Ride:) Getting more children walking and biking to school is a goal shared by transportation professionals everywhere. The benefits are clear: healthier kids, safer streets, less traffic around school gates, and active travel habits that can last a lifetime. But with limited budgets and hundreds of schools to support, how do you know where to focus your efforts to make the biggest difference? We've spoken with cities that are only able to conduct two or three school road safety audits each year. At that rate, it could take **50 years to gather road safety information from every school in their region.** That's a very long time to wait to understand where children and families are experiencing problems on their journeys to school. Traditional road safety audits have value, but they're also time-consuming and resource-intensive. **We knew there had to be a better way.** Therefore, we designed a methodology to help transportation professionals to: 1. gather useful road safety information from far more school communities (from more people, from more schools) 2. at a fraction of the time and cost ## **Making it easier for families to share their experiences** The idea behind Love to Ride's **SchoolWays** is pretty simple: make it really easy for parents to tell you where they feel unsafe on their journeys to school. Whether they walk, bike, scoot or drive, parents can share their experiences in just a few minutes. They can: - Draw the route they take to school on a map. - Identify which parts of their journey feel safe or unsafe - they can literally paint their route with their finger or mouse cursor, e.g. red on the parts of the route they feel unsafe. - Pinpoint locations where they've experienced or witnessed near misses, crashes or other road safety concerns. - Optionally add comments and photos to explain what's happening.   ![Screenshot 2026-11-05 at 20.39.12](https://blog.lovetoride.net/hs-fs/hubfs/Screenshot%202026-11-05%20at%2020.39.12.png?width=1852&height=1588&name=Screenshot%202026-11-05%20at%2020.39.12.png) There's no app to download and no account to create. Parents simply click a link or scan a QR code and provide their feedback. **The easier we make it for parents and school communities to contribute, the more community feedback we can collect.** And there's another important part to making this approach work at scale: using the communication channels that schools already have. Schools regularly communicate with parents through emails, newsletters, school apps and other channels. By working with schools and using these existing networks, it's possible to reach tens of thousands of families across a region without having to organize individual consultation events at every school (and with only a handful of parents). Parents can provide feedback when it suits them, and the information is collected digitally from the start. No piles of paper forms to process, no manually transferring comments onto maps, and no spending hours digitizing information before you can begin analyzing it. It's a more efficient way to gather valuable community feedback across many schools, while making it easier for more families to have their say. ## **Better data helps you make better decisions** Of course, collecting more feedback is only useful if you can turn it into information that helps you make decisions. That's where the mapping and analysis become particularly valuable. By bringing together the routes families use and their feedback about safety and comfort, we can build a much clearer picture of school travel across a community. The data helps you see: - **Where families travel:** The most commonly used routes to school, broken down by travel mode. - **Where people feel unsafe:** Streets and intersections where parents and students report feeling uncomfortable or concerned. - **Where problems are being reported:** Locations with reported near misses, crashes and other road safety issues. - **Where improvements may have the greatest impact:** Commonly used routes with significant safety concerns that warrant further investigation. Instead of having detailed feedback from just a handful of schools, you can start building a region-wide picture of school travel and road safety. ![map](https://blog.lovetoride.net/hs-fs/hubfs/map.png?width=431&height=400&name=map.png) This can help you identify which schools, routes and intersections need closer attention and where more detailed road safety assessments may be valuable. Schoolways is all about **giving transportation professionals better information to help prioritize where further investigation, planning work, and subsequent investments are most needed.** And when budgets are tight, that matters. The more you understand about where families are travelling and the barriers they're experiencing, the better placed you are to direct your limited resources towards improvements that could benefit the greatest number of people. ## **Helping the next generation travel actively** Getting more children walking and biking to school isn't just about changing how they make one journey. It's an opportunity to help children build healthy habits, make school streets safer and create communities where active travel is an easier choice for everyone. And if **we can gather better information from more school communities, more quickly and affordably,** we can help transportation professionals make better decisions and deliver improvements where they're needed most. **Better data. Better decisions. Better budget impact. Safer journeys. And more kids walking and biking to school.** If you're working on Safe Routes to School, school travel planning or active travel programs, we'd love to hear about the challenges you're tackling and share what we've learned. You can also[explore Love to Ride's school travel tools](https://partners.lovetoride.net/schools), another affordable way you can encourage more students and parents to bike, walk, and wheel to school. --- ##### Published on: 1, Oct 2024 ### Want more information? 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