Evaluating safe routes to school events that designate days for walking and bicycling

Effects of Funding Allocation for Safe Routes to School Programs on Active Commuting to School and Related Behavioral, Knowledge, and Psychosocial Outcomes

“…This might be because these schools were in the process of gathering data or implementing programs at the time of baseline data collection, and so, the ACS counts might have been higher than normal. In contrast, other studies have shown that support for special SRTS events and designated days can increase child motivation to walk to school (Buckley, Lowry, Brown, & Barton, 2013), but factors influencing long-term maintenance of these programs and policies and the resulting ACS behaviors are not well elucidated.…”

The Effectiveness of Healthy Community Approaches on Positive Health Outcomes in Canada and the United States

“…Another pilot study by Mendoza and colleagues employed a cluster randomized controlled trial to investigate the impact of a five week WSB intervention on rates of active commuting and physical activity levels [22]. Most studies employed multifaceted interventions that included education, traffic enforcement and engineering improvements however a few studies utilized only one strategy (commonly walking school bus) to influence active modes of school transportation [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Consistent with the goal of increasing rates of children's active transportation to and from school, most studies focused on reporting intermediary outcomes such as travel behavior and attitudes.…”

A Contextual Look at Safe Routes to School Implementation in Texas

“…SRTS programs have been shown to increase student active commuting to school (ACS; Buckley, Lowry, Brown, & Barton, 2013;Davison, Werder, & Lawson, 2008;McDonald, Yang, Abbot, & Bullock, 2013;Staunton, Hubsmith, & Kallins, 2003;Stewart, Moudon, & Claybrooke, 2014) and reduce pedestrian injury among youth (Cooper & McMillan, 2010;DiMaggio & Li, 2013;Muennig, Epstein, Li, & DiMaggio, 2014). In addition, ACS can contribute to increases in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (Faulkner, Stone, Buliung, Wong, & Mitra, 2013;Mendoza et al, 2011;Sirard, Alhassan, Spencer, & Robinson, 2008), which is important as schoolchildren in Texas have been shown to have low levels of physical activity (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014;Hoelscher et al, 2010).…”

“…Although the evidence shows that SRTS programs can have a positive effect on student ACS, little research has been done on how broader environmental factors affecting the SRTS grant implementation process affect achievement of program goals. Furthermore, there have been few qualitative studies on the broader contextual influences on SRTS programs, with current studies primarily focused on parental motivation (Buckley et al, 2013;McDonald & Aalborg, 2009) and perceptions (DeWeese, Yedidia, Tullock, & Ohri-Vachaspati, 2013) or program successes (Cooper & McMillan, 2010).…”