Portland Safe Routes to School Project Planning

Project Summary

Toole Design helped the City of Portland work toward its goal of creating safe walking routes to each of the City’s 113 neighborhood schools. We created a prioritized list of projects citywide that gave special attention to historically underserved neighborhoods and streets with the most severe safety issues. We then developed a model to identify the most likely walking routes for all Portland schools, pinpoint their safety challenges, and recommended solutions that would work for walking children. We also developed a Street Design Toolkit to make it easier for City staff to communicate with school communities about the goals and values of the City’s Safe Routes to School initiative, and common infrastructure elements that are used in Safe Routes To School projects. The project list and identified routes were approved by City Council, and the Portland Bureau of Transportation has already begun construction on several high-priority projects recommended by our research.

Expertise Applied

• Safe Routes to School
• Data Science and Analysis