Scott Swanson
Sweet Home’s bid to get Ore-gon Safe Routes to School funding to improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety on Mountain View Road near the intersection with 22nd Avenue and Sweet Home Junior High got its start Thursday, March 6.
That was when city and school officials, and several community members, met with Tarah Campi, transportation options outreach coordinator for Oregon Cascades West Council of Government in Albany, to talk about the situation and take the first steps toward creating an action plan to apply for a grant from the program operated by Oregon Department of Transportation.
The meeting included Police Chief Jeff Lynn, City Manager Craig Martin, city engineer and transportation planner Joe Graybill, along with junior high Principal Colleen Henry and school district Business Manager Kevin Strong.
Campi said Safe Routes to School is a national program funded at the federal level that promotes safe walking and biking for students, mostly kindergarteners through eighth-graders, primarily to and from school. The goal, she said, is to incorporate safe walking and biking into students’ day as cost-effective means of transportation, a source of exercise and a way to improve community safety and “community connections.”
She said her office is focusing on communities, like Sweet Home, that do not have programs in place.
An action plan, which is the first step in receiving funds from Oregon Department of Transportation for Safe Routes projects, will be completed in June, Campi said. Since ODOT prefers action plans to be school-specific, this one will focus on the junior high, she said. “Ideally, in the future it can be expanded out to other schools and the work we do now can be shared in the documentation for other schools as it’s expanded.
“It’s kind of the entry requirement,” she said of the action plan. The ODOT funding could be for anything from bike racks to a coordinator who promotes walking and biking in a school district, to infrastructure projects such as sidewalks.
Ken Bronson, attending the meeting as a local cycling enthusiast, said Mountain View is “a conflict every day.”
“It’s narrow, there’s no sidewalks, there’s kids in the streets.”
Graybill said there have been accidents involving students, and Lynn said he doesn’t recall any recent ones, but he said the police could search their records to find out when and where those occurred.
He said he applied a couple of years ago to get ODOT funding to improve the Mountain View corridor between Elm Street and Long Street.
“I thought I had good, reasonable justifications and the whole bit, but they turned me down,” he said. “It’s a competition for money. We don’t have funding to do these infrastructure projects ourselves, so we rely on grants.
“That’s why this is great, because we can get this process started and then we can get the grants.”
Campi said that if the city has projects “coming down the pipeline that this is in any way relevant to,” that can be “referenced” in the action plan.
The action plan will look at goals and input from parents and teachers, at existing programs, programs the school would like to see, and data collection such as parent surveys that are already being circulated by junior high staffers.
Safe Routes focuses on “the Five E’s”: Education, such as bike safety clinics or learning pedestrian safety; Encouragement –”the fun part,” Campi said, “giving away stickers and prizes and fun things, having contests about walking and biking;” Enforcement – working with law enforcement in enforcing no-idling zones, crosswalk safety and so on; Engineering, which is the infrastructure needs around a school, such as sidewalk construction; and Evaluation – data collection and analysis.
Martin said he believes there will need to be education to address “an awareness issue” among motorists and pedestrians or cyclists.
Henry said her school’s Site Council, which includes both parents and staff members, has expressed concerns particularly about parents who park on 22nd Avenue, on the side opposite from the school, whose students cross the street without using the crosswalk “right in the middle between cars that are parked there, between buses that are coming up the hill.”
Also, she said, Mountain View is not lighted and “kids are walking to school in the dark.”
Campi said there will be two or three more meetings before June as she puts the action plan together. She said parents need to fill out the surveys circulated by the school.
“I’m on board to kind of spearhead the process and do the behind-the-scenes work to get it submitted, but it really is the community’s document,” she said.
She said a Walk and Bike Challenge will be held in May, to focus students on those activities, which will include incentives to reward students who walk and bike.
Also, School Pool, a website provided by the state at http://www.rideshareonline.com/commuters/schoolpool.html, allows parents and students to match up for ridesharing and car pooling, she said.
City officials suggested that the education component could be incorporated into the city’s Public Safety Fair, which is held annually in June.
Blair Smith, a retired Sweet Home fire chief, said the stretch of Mountain View around the junior high has been “a big thing for years.”
“We’ve promised parents for years that they were going to get it. When the city accepted the county road in, it didn’t get nothing there. This is a treacherous stretch of road here and we’ve been awful fortunate we haven’t killed a child,” he said, his voice cracking.
Lynn said his children will be attending the junior high “for the next four years” and walk home on Mountain View.
He said the Police Department has engaged in bicycle safety efforts in the past, “but maybe just not on a large enough scale.”
He said the department could beef up its education efforts and noted that grants from ODOT will fund planned future “crosswalk enforcement opportunities” to enhance pedestrian safety.
Graybill observed that he can speak from personal experience.
“I came over here to the junior high years and years ago – rode my bike, walked up and down the highways,” he said. “It’s not great and unfortunately, it’ll take a long time to fix, basically, and make a whole lot safer. But we’ll start it. That’s basically the goal. Once you get going, you can keep the plan going, you can get something like this on board too,
“Eventually we’ll get all the way to a decent, inside-the-city-limits urban street – bike lanes, sidewalks, where people can walk and not be in the travel lane. That’s the bottom line.”
Campi said she will take input from last week’s meeting, along with information from the parent survey, and start the action plan. She said another meeting will be held in April, with probable follow-up meetings in May and possibly June. She said she hopes more parents will turn out for the next gathering.
“Hopefully, more of them will be at the last meeting, but we’ve got information from them in the survey, which is helpful.”