As many of you know, it’s award season! From the Golden Globes to the Screen Actor's Guild Awards and all the way to the Oscars… there are nominees and winners. Here at the Safe Routes Partnership we wanted in on the award season action. For the past year, the National Shared Use Task Force has been engaging in conversations about ways that we could recognize all of the great work that is happening across the country in the shared use field.

Sara Zimmerman is program and policy director at the Safe Routes Partnership.

Click here to see the Storify highlights from the #MoveEquity Tweetchat on ending street harassment to get more kids walking and biking.

The majority of Americans live in urban or suburban areas, though around 15 percent of Americans live in nonmetropolitan regions, which make up 72 percent of US land. Although the proportion of Americans who are rural residents has recently declined, these communities still comprise 46.1 million Americans (USDA, 2015). When it comes to health outcomes, researchers have identified inequities in rural areas, including higher rates of obesity compared with urban residents and differing levels of physical activity by geographic region (Yousefian et al., 2009; Hansen and Harley, 2015).

Back in May, we asked you to take action against the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) proposed “system performance measures” that would have measured the speed of cars and trucks in seven different ways, while devoting no measures at all to people walking, bicycling, and taking transit. 

Fired Up! That’s the best way I can describe the energy on the first day of the 3rd Safe Routes to School National Conference, which is being held at the Minneapolis Convention Center. About 600 people from nearly every state in the US came here seeking to learn, share and build connections so that they can go home with new tools to improve their communities, making them safer for kids to walk and bike – improving health, communities and the environment.