Walkability & Bikeability Checklists
Checklists provide a way to easily record safety problems along walking and bicycling routes to school. They can also be used to share information with school and community leaders and media.
Consider the following advice from other checklist users:
- Have lots of copies of the checklist available
- Make copies of blank checklists and hand them out. The more comments you get, the better. This is an important way to build awareness and support about problems that need to be fixed.
- Make certain that school administrators, public officials and the media receive checklists, too.
- Suggest that the local newspaper print a version before the Walk to School or Bike to School event.
- Recruit public officials
- Ask law enforcement, traffic engineers and department of public works officials to take part, and listen to their opinions and ideas. They are the experts in crafting solutions to walking and biking challenges.
- Collect checklists and compile the results
- Involve students in reading checklists and tabulating and summarizing the results.
- Ask for help
- Share the results with people who can take action and ask them to help. Different types of problems need the help of different people. For instance, if speeding is a problem, law enforcement may need to help. If sidewalks are needed, the city public works department may need to know. If there’s no funding for sidewalks, city leaders need to hear that students would like to walk or bicycle if they could. Below is a quick guide to who to try contacting depending on the problem.
- Speeding drivers: Law enforcement
- Drivers don’t yield to pedestrians: Law enforcement
- Not enough time to cross signalized streets: Public works department
- Broken or blocked sidewalks: Public works department
- Missing sidewalks: City council
View and download
Walkability checklist in English (.pdf download, 900 KB)
Walkability checklist in Spanish (.pdf download, 872 KB)
Bikeability checklist in English (.pdf download, 846 KB)
Bikeability checklist in Spanish (.pdf download, 936 KB)
