Given the opportunity, children will walk, ride their bikes, or otherwise get around in ways that are adventurous, invigorating, and fun. For many children today, that opportunity is lacking in the first journey of the day - going to school is a dreary act of drudgery, spent in the back seat of a car or on a school bus. Getting school children out of motorized vehicles and onto their feet enriches the child's social relationships with friends and neighbors, allows children to learn street safety lessons, makes the school trip one that is and adventure of learning, and helps to develop independent mobility, which improves a child's confidence. Additionally, walking or biking helps improve children's physical health and mental well-being and is a positive step toward getting more motor vehicles off of local streets, reducing traffic congestion as well as improving air quality and traffic safety.
The RBA Group has consistently promoted pedestrian and bicycle safety in our planning, urban design and landscape architecture projects and has developed extensive experience with Safe Routes to School projects, traffic calming techniques, traffic and transportation engineering, transportation planning, community outreach, bicycle/pedestrian planning, and graphic and visualization techniques.
The RBA Group's specialized experience, spanning a wide range of local and national locations, includes numerous large-scale projects involving bicycle and pedestrian safety programs. Of particular note, RBA's work on a Safe Routes to School program for New York City is one of the largest undertaken in the United States. In addition, RBA completed Phase I of a statewide Safe Routes to School program for the New Jersey Department of Transportation and was retained by the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center to develop and conduct national Safe Routes to School workshops. RBA is recently conducted three demonstration Safe Routes to School workshops at schools in Lumberton, Jamesburg and Montclair, NJ as part of the NJDOT Statewide Safe Routes to School Program.
The RBA Group is made up of experts on Safe Routes to School programs and includes staff who have been trained and certified as a Safe Routes to School specialists by the Federal Highway Administration and the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center. In addition, our graphic design staff has experience creating a variety of educational material for Safe Routes to School projects including newsletters, web pages, brochures and fact sheets.
For more information on The RBA Group and Safe Routes to School, please see our recent newsletter Life in the Slow Lane.
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