Walking or cycling to the neighborhood school is the goal of the Safe Routes to School program.
SRTS is a nationwide initiative to improve student health and reduce traffic congestion around schools.
Zaragoza Elementary School in East Dallas is one of four North Texas campuses in the program.
Carroll Avenue beside the school is lined with cars of parents picking up their kids.
Wayne Johnson was there Thursday to pick up his grandchild.
“There’s so much traffic, it makes the kids scared,” Johnson said. “It even makes grownups scared sometimes. You don’t even want to cross the street because the cars and stuff.”
Transportation planners from the North Central Texas Council of Governments conducted a safety audit at Zaragoza for the program Thursday.
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“This school is an old neighborhood school that was not designed for the amount of parents that now drive their kids to school,” said NCTCOG planner Kathryn Rush.
Rush and her team studied signs, street markings and traffic patterns around the school looking for ways to improve safety and make more parents and children feel safe walking or riding bikes to the campus.
“If you make the area around the school safer and more easy to walk, that means the entire neighborhood is going to benefit,” Rush said.
The program also encourages physical activity and healthier kids in a state where child obesity rates are very high.
Parents at Zaragoza also prefer to drive kids to school out of concern about predators.
“It is busy. [It's] more the people I worry about than the actual cars,” said parent Clotile Owens. “My daughter had an incident where someone jumped in her face and we had to call the police on her way to school.”
Rush said additional police patrols may be a recommendation of the SRTS program.
“Anything they can do to make these streets a little bit safer, let’s do it,” Wayne Johnson said.
The audit at Zaragoza Thursday will lead to final plans later this year for improvements around the school.
