Safe Routes to School in Columbus, Ohio started in the mid-2000s as a cooperative effort that spoke to public health, the Department of Public Services, and the Safe Walks program, involving Safe Routes to School travel plans for a school or a group of a few schools. These efforts brought about mobility studies for a few different neighborhoods. The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) funded SRTS projects at individual schools, but they were also receiving a lot of applications for larger school districts.

A week ago, Congress reached agreement on overall spending caps, which would allow for significant increases in defense and domestic spending in FY2018 and FY2019.  Their agreement includes an additional $10 billion per year for two years to put towards different kinds of infrastructure investments (broader than just transportation).  Congress now has about six weeks to divide those overall increases into the funding allocations for federal programs and agencies.

On January 30, President Trump delivered his state of the union. A few sentences in his speech referenced the long-delayed infrastructure package, as he called on Congress to pass a bill that would pair any Federal dollars with state, local, and private investments to “build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways.”

Moscow, Idaho is a community of 25,000, located eight miles from Washington State with a bike path that connects the University of Idaho in Moscow to the University of Washington. Initially, active transportation efforts were focused more on enjoyment of the outdoors and connection with schools, with little attention paid to the safety component. This started to change roughly 10 years ago when the University of Idaho partnered with the City of Moscow on the area’s Safe Routes to School initiatives – the city took on engineering with the University covering the rest of the E’s.