Oregon has turn out to be a nationwide chief strolling and biking to high school. Our state had the best fee of faculty participation out of 48 states in America who participated in Worldwide Stroll and Roll to College Day on October seventh.
The information comes from from the Oregon Division of Transportation and is predicated on numbers from the Nationwide Heart for Secure Routes to College. That group crunched knowledge from the 2024 occasion and located that 210 faculties registered for the occasion out of a complete of 921 Okay-8 public faculties. That share was larger than California, Virginia, Washington D.C., and Massachusetts.
“The keenness for Stroll & Roll to College Day throughout Oregon displays our shared dedication to constructing safer, extra linked communities,” ODOT Secure Routes to College Program Supervisor Heidi Manlove mentioned in an announcement. The participation quantity is nearly again to what it was previous to the Covid pandemic. In 2020, simply 61 faculties participated. However in 2019 the quantity was 263 faculties.
Now think about if ODOT truly funded the Secure Routes to College program on the degree it wants.
It’s clear that Home Invoice 2017 (the earlier transportation spending package deal handed by the Oregon Legislature in 2017) has helped spark extra school-based biking and strolling packages statewide. That invoice carved out $10 million per 12 months beginning in 2018 and $15 million per 12 months beginning in 2023 from the State Freeway Fund for Secure Routes to College. The funds are distributed by way of a grant program that can be utilized to construct infrastructure initiatives or for academic and encouragement packages.
Whereas the quantity was unprecedented and hailed by advocates on the time, it’s not almost sufficient to maintain up with demand. On August twenty first, ODOT’s personal Secure Routes to College Advisory Committee wrote a letter to Oregon Transportation Fee (OTC) Chair Julie Brown and ODOT Director Kris Strickler. The aim of the letter was to push again on ODOT’s low-ball estimate for what this system wants going ahead as lawmakers look to go a brand new funding invoice in 2025.
In a doc shared at an October sixteenth assembly of the Joint Committee on Transportation Public and Energetic Transit Workgroup, ODOT pegged the annual Secure Routes to College want at $50 million per 12 months. That quantity was primarily based on the typical of all challenge requests in every grant solicitation cycle because the passage of HB 2017.
However leaders of the ODOT Secure Routes to College Advisory Committee say that’s not sufficient. They are saying faculties request 5 instances the quantity out there each two-year cycle. In 2024 there have been $138 million price of grants requested for Oregon’s $30 million in out there funds. “With this current oversubscription, in addition to the continued challenge of price will increase for development initiatives that we’ve got needed to mitigate for with our current funds, we imagine the funding in Secure Routes to College may benefit from as much as $75 million per 12 months over the subsequent 30 years to successfully meet the wants of each faculty within the state.”
The truth that an ODOT committee is publicly asking for more cash than ODOT themselves ought to increase eyebrows. It speaks to the frustration of getting a really impactful and widespread program that’s starved for money whereas ODOT continues to pour cash into freeway enlargement megaprojects statewide. At a gathering of the OTC final week, commissioners accepted one other $72 million for the $815 million (present estimate) I-205 Abernethy Bridge challenge — a challenge whose price has risen 228% lately.
As insiders and lawmakers survey the political panorama forward of the 2025 legislative session, the debates about program-level funding are more likely to get heated. Governor Tina Kotek has outlined a finances that assumes the legislature will increase no less than $1.75 billion to pay for transportation initiatives and packages like Secure Routes to College. However with ODOT saying they want twice that quantity it’s unclear what they’ll sacrifice to get a invoice handed.
Secure Routes to College is probably going protected, however whether or not it will get the funding it really deserves is anybody’s guess.
