Every year, students walking to school count on crossing guards, traffic signals, alert drivers, and their own instincts to stay safe.
Yet each school year brings stories of students killed or injured by cars while heading to school on foot.
The number of school-age pedestrians killed on weekdays during the school year has remained roughly unchanged over the past five years, according to an Education Week analysis of federal data. In 2024, the most recent year where statistics are available, 134 children walking during those time periods were killed, with many of those deaths occurring during the early morning and evening hours, when students are more likely to be on the move.
Researchers say policy changes, like reduced-speed signs and providing students with safety lessons, can’t solve the problem alone. Some cities, including New York, are going further by closing streets near schools.
The simple act of “crossing the street is difficult for kids,” said David C. Schwebel, vice president for research at the University of Iowa, who studies child pedestrian safety.
Even at a two-lane crossing, he said, a child must judge how far away cars are, how fast they’re going, and whether they’re speeding up, in both directions.
“You’ve got eight variables that the child has to process in their head,” he said.
The federal data show that school-age pedestrian fatalities have fallen from a recent peak of 195 in 2016.
But the lower numbers in recent years may be deceiving, because in general, there’s been a long-term trend of children walking less, said Ralph Buehler, a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Virginia Tech University. The rate of pedestrian fatalities may actually be increasing, because fewer students are on foot.
The danger rises during certain times of day. School-age pedestrian deaths spike around 6 a.m., often before sunrise, the analysis shows. They climb again in the evening and stay high through about 8 p.m.
That matches traffic overall, said Buehler. Pedestrian and cyclist crashes cluster at dawn and dusk, he said, rising around 5 or 6 p.m. in fall and winter “because that’s when it gets dark and when many cars are out.”
Afternoon schedules bring other risks, said Noreen McDonald, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“In the morning, it’s much easier for parents to coordinate travel with their children,” she said. Later in the day, caregivers are often still at work, so children may be more likely to walk, bike, or catch a ride with friends.
Plus, American vehicles tend to be relatively large, making children harder to see from the driver’s seat, and making crashes more severe, Buehler said.
Road design matters, too. Around many schools, especially in the suburbs, it’s common for drivers to exceed the speed limit, ignoring signs asking them to slow down.
“The roads are built for higher speeds, and drivers will just not go slow enough,” Buehler said. Narrower lanes and tighter turns slow drivers in a way signs cannot, he said.
One major city works to slow down drivers near schools
New York City is testing that idea at scale. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration said in September that it had reduced speed limits to 15 mph near more than 200 school locations this year. The city expects the program to reach roughly 800 school locations by year’s end, along with street redesigns near hundreds of schools.
The city is also expanding a different program, called Open Streets, which temporarily closes certain streets around schools to car traffic, in order to allow car-free recreational and learning activities, as well as pick-up and drop-offs. The program is not new. It began in 2020 as a pandemic outdoor-learning effort, and the city is planning 77 school Open Streets this year.
Uptake of the program been slow, though. Just 48 public schools took part in Open Streets last school year, according to an August report from city Comptroller Mark Levine. The report blamed an application process that asks principals to draft plans and gather letters of support, then wait at least 90 days.
Vincent Barone, a spokesperson for the city’s department of transportation, said the city is changing its approach. In the next application cycle, transportation officials will work directly with individual schools to apply for and participate in the program.
In choosing which schools to approach to take part, he said, it will weigh crash data; the priorities of Vision Zero, the city’s effort to eliminate traffic deaths; and whether neighborhoods near the schools are short on open space.
What works on a block in New York City, however, may not work on a suburban highway. For example, in much of Virginia, Buehler said, roads belong to the state, so districts must work with counties and the state transportation department to change them.
“We have very limited money to do these kinds of interventions,” McDonald said.
Schools should think long term about road safety
Another option for schools to make it safer for students to walk to and from class is to give them a way onto campus that avoids the busiest road.
“You can find bikeways that access the school from another side that is safer,” Buehler said.
McDonald said communities can also take advantage of periods when roads near schools are under construction to put in place safety measures.
“The road may be getting repaved, and it’s an opportunity to put in crosswalks, put in bike lanes, narrow the traffic, decrease the speed,” she said.
A longer-term fix is to rethink where schools are built. Districts have moved toward larger campuses located farther from residential neighborhoods, Buehler said, which makes driving more necessary. When choosing sites for new schools, he said, districts should plan for how students will get there on foot or by bike.
Teaching children about pedestrian safety still helps, but it takes far more practice than most kids get.
Schwebel uses a virtual reality simulator in his lab at University of Iowa to teach children to cross streets. His team got 7-year-olds to cross as safely as adults, but it took an average of 12 to 13 hours of simulator practice.
Most children never get that much practice, Schwebel said. The skill develops over time, and “it is harder than most adults recognize to cross the street safely,” he said.
“We should not assume children are safe because they’ve had an hour lesson or safety week lessons,” he said.
For superintendents, Buehler said, the first step is mapping the routes students actually take, then pressing the officials who control those roads.
“In practice, it means making a safety argument to the city council or the county board,” he said.
The goal is not to keep children off the streets.
“It’s good for your brain to have physical activity,” Buehler said. “We should do as many things as we can to encourage children to walk and cycle to school. But we have to do it safely.”
