Challenge

Across Palm Beach County, several recurring conditions affect student safety and access near schools, including missing sidewalks, limited crossing opportunities on multilane roadways, challenging visibility at intersections, and conflicts between students who are walking or biking and vehicle drop-off activity during arrival and dismissal periods. There are 250 schools in Palm Beach County, and the size and diversity of the school system presents opportunities and challenges for Safe Routes to School (SRTS) planning. School locations, enrollment sizes, grade configurations, and surrounding land use contexts vary widely across the county, which results in a range of student travel patterns and safety needs.

The Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) wanted to strengthen its SRTS planning and implementation countywide while supporting priority projects in its Long-Range Transportation Plan. The MPO needed a process to help with identifying SRTS projects and implementing them in a real timeline.

Solution

Kittelson led the development of an SRTS Action Plan, working closely with MPO staff and agency partners throughout the process. The action plan helps schools to direct their limited planning and implementation resources to where the safety need is greatest and to existing programs that can effectively advance improvements.

Our team created the prioritization framework using hazardous walking maps and decision-support tools, coordinated field reviews at priority school locations, and guided identification and documentation of the top 20 SRTS projects. The framework is designed to be both transparent and repeatable to allow the MPO to refresh input over time and maintain an implementable pipeline of SRTS projects.

We also facilitated an SRTS workshop where the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) and local stakeholders shared walk/bike audit findings, discussed SRTS best practices, and reviewed recommended projects.