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The second annual Tennessee Bike Summit took place during May in Memphis, Tennessee. I had the pleasure of attending with a few hundred others from all across the volunteer state, who support bicycling as a form of transportation and recreation.

This spring, families and schools across the country joined in the Fire Up Your Feet activity challenge, a program designed to encourage students, families, and school staff to walk, bike, and get physical activity in daily life. Together, families and schools logged a collective 292,400 minutes of activity and more than 7,000 miles.

In June, articles in the Akron Beacon Journal highlighted the safety inequity between urban and suburban students that walk or bike to school (you can read them here and

In less than a week, the fourth Safe Routes to School National Conference will kick off in Sacramento, California. Since 2007, the biannual National Conference has brought Safe Routes to School champions together to share success stories, learn from one another and chart the course for the future.

The Greater Washington communities in Virginia gained four new Safe Routes to School coordinators in the last round of Virginia Department of Transportation Safe Routes to School funding!

Last week, while visiting the doctor for flu-like symptoms, Safe Routes Partnership director Deb Hubsmith was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). This type of leukemia comes on very quickly, and Deb's doctors caught it early and started treatment right away. She will be in and out of the hospital over the next couple of months while going through chemotherapy. Once treated, AML has a good remission and survival rate. Her doctors fully expect remission following her treatment course. 

Ready to act? Contact your members of Congress now.  Want more background?  Keep reading...

This South Providence Elementary School Had a Chronic Absenteeism Problem. Then They Started a Walking School Bus. 

At first, the maps didn’t make sense. Why would the kids who lived closest to school – all within one mile – have the most problems with chronic absenteeism? 

The deadline to prevent the Highway Trust Fund from becoming insolvent is rapidly approaching, leaving Congress and the Administration with just months to identify a solution.  But will they be up to the task?  The stakes for Congress couldn’t be higher, with a failure to act putting hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk and bringing thousands of construction projects, includ

The technologies drawing attention are user-centric that allow both users and providers to interact and share information about the transportation network. Active transportation and Safe Routes to Schools advocates should care about these trends because they are expanding transportation options, promoting active lifestyles and tipping the political scales towards multi-modalism in planning and implementation.The digital space is using the influx of information (i.e. big data) to find patterns and efficiencies in the transportation system. These mobile and web applications are facilitating supportive programs and policies for walking, bicycling and Safe Routes to School, even when active transportation is not the immediate focus of mobile and web applications. Safe Routes to School supporters will be able to better partner with transportation agencies, organizations and advocates, if they stay alert to the culture changes that technology is causing within transportation.

First, I posit that ride and car-sharing services will bolster walkable and bikeable communities. I see many ways that students and families will be supported and encouraged to be car-free or car-limited with more reliable alternative networks, such as ride and car-share, cross jurisdictional bicycle and pedestrian networks and public transportation. Ridesharing mobile applications like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar are booming and flipped the script on taxi and car services and local job creation. Users of ride share applications can name their price for trips with Lyft and benefit (or suffer) with surge pricing with Uber. Potentially communities benefits in the strengthening of ride and car-share through crowdsourcing affordability and flexibility. Paratransit riders - usually the elderly and persons with disability - are also frequent users of ride-shares. Additionally, car sharing companies like Zipcar allow drivers to rent a car by the hour, where prices include insurance and maintenance. Personally, I know families that would benefit from having better access to alternative networks to get children to school and after-school activities. One family in particular was forced to give up their car free lifestyle when the local Zipcar location was closed. These technologies are means to fill in the transportation gaps for communities and families.