Revamp Urban Infrastructure to Enhance Child Safety and Mobility

This brief is part of “Election 2024: Policy Playbook,” a series by Rice University and the Baker Institute that offers critical context, analysis, and recommendations to inform policymaking in the United States and Texas.

The Big Picture

• Almost half of U.S. children walked or cycled (collectively called active transportation) to school in 1969. But now that number is just over 10%, likely contributing to poorer physical and mental health.
• Before the current understanding of urban sprawl and sedentarism, the design of Texas cities and towns prioritized motor vehicle mobility. Greater distances between amenities and limited infrastructure for physical activity has negatively affected child mobility.
• Lowering speed limits, locating schools with child pedestrians in mind, and prioritizing transportation safety in road design can all help maximize child physical and mental health.

Summarizing the Issue

Parents often hesitate to let their children walk or bike to school due to the risk of motor vehicle accidents. Texas, which has a higher child active transportation death rate than the American average, is a prime candidate for reform.[1] The benefits are well documented and include improved physical and mental health, along with greater childhood autonomy which, in turn, can foster resilience and self-agency. 

Creating child-friendly, walkable environments near where children live and attend school can yield significant benefits in all of these health measures. Ways to do this include retrofitting the streets around a school to maximize walkability or, when new schools are built, choosing a site that prioritizes pedestrian and bicyclist access. Improving child physical activity and autonomy presents an opportunity to reduce transportation-related deaths and improve a number of other public health metrics. 

Expert Analysis

The most effective way to decrease child transportation injuries and increase parental confidence in allowing children to walk and bike is to mandate lower speeds. This achieves two key goals: 1) it gives drivers more time to react and avoid potential collisions, and 2) it lessens the severity of crashes that do occur.

Lowering speed limits in areas where children are likely to walk and redesigning roads and intersections to promote slower speeds and safer pedestrian experiences are evidence-based interventions that can make a significant difference  (Figure 1).

Figure 1 — Correlation Between Vehicle Speed and Fatalities

Often, this involves redesigning existing roads, which were previously optimized to prioritize motor vehicle volume over public health and well-being. These interventions have all been shown to reduce motor vehicle speeds and improve safety:

• Narrowing lane widths. 
• Reducing the number of lanes. 
• Limiting the number of unsignalized driveways. 

Together with improved sidewalks and crosswalks, these measures can create an environment where people of all ages can comfortably walk or bike safely. 

Additionally, communities can improve child active transportation activity by siting new schools on slower moving streets and using architectural elements to promote healthy transportation, such as creating non-street entrances, separating children from the motor vehicle drop-off area, and limiting the size of the drop off area.

Other Perspectives

While increased child activity and safety are widely supported, there are valid concerns that redesigning roads and limiting motor vehicle speeds could adversely affect the local economy, potentially leading to traffic congestion or reduced motor vehicle access to commercial areas. Therefore, robust community engagement is crucial. Sometimes, redesigning a single intersection can alleviate a pedestrian choke point, while in other cases, comprehensive road redesigns are necessary.

Any redesign proposals should be accompanied by a review of the literature. Studies suggest that increasing foot traffic in many commercial corridors often leads to increased business success, decreased commercial vacancies, increased local tax revenue, and reduced public expenditure. However, Texas-specific studies are limited, and there are exceptions where businesses have struggled following comprehensive road redesigns aimed at improving active transportation.

Policy Actions

The following policy recommendations could address these challenges and maximize benefits for child transportation safety while also supporting the economic health of communities:

• Allow cities and towns to lower speed limits on residential streets without having to conduct traffic studies and other costly projects.
• Create pedestrian-oriented places by promoting mixed-use development and pedestrian-friendly areas. This can be done through decreased land-use regulation, parking minimums, and lowering other regulatory hurdles in order to increase pedestrian friendliness where the market provides the opportunity.
• Design and locate schools to promote active (nonmotorized) transportation, such as walking and biking. This may involve limiting the distance schools are set back from streets, limiting the size of car pickup lines on campus, and placing new schools on slow-moving neighborhood streets.
• Designate funding to support safe routes to school programming and infrastructure, ensuring that all children have access to safe, walkable routes.
• Prioritize transportation safety by allocating funds for Vision Zero standards — a movement adopted by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) that aims to eliminate all traffic fatalities in the state by 2050.
• Allocate funds to conduct comprehensive research on road redesigns to identify best practices and share the results across cities. This will inform future interventions and ensure that they are effective and beneficial to both public health and the economy.

The Bottom Line

Finding opportunities to lower speed limits, locating schools with child pedestrians in mind, and prioritizing transportation safety in road design can all help maximize child physical and mental health. If done well, focused improvement in speed limit legislation and environmental standards can improve child pedestrian and bicyclist activity. In doing so, cities and municipalities can improve child physical and mental health while helping communities flourish.

Note

[1] Calculated by author using the 2022 data for children under 18 fatally injured as pedestrians or pedalcyclists, provided by the NHTSA through https://cdan.dot.gov/query, and population estimates from the 2022 American Community Survey five-year data for children under 18, sourced from data.census.gov.

This material may be quoted or reproduced without prior permission, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The views expressed herein are those of the individual author(s), and do not necessarily represent the views of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.