Where WA schoolchildren walk next to busy traffic

SEATAC, Wash. – An important piece was missing when the Kent School District opened its $39 million River Ridge Elementary for the 2021-22 school year.

As a result, 30 to 50 children walk the shoulder where sidewalks are absent along Military Road South, a predicament common among many schools in Washington state.

Joe Vinson meets his fourth-grade son Quentin at the roadside, where he says near-hits are frequent.

“This has gone on for far too long,” Vinson said.

Families were told sidewalks would be done last fall, and now it won’t happen until this fall, Vinson said.

U.S. schools are often built on the suburban fringe, where formerly rural roads aren’t next to housing, or aren’t equipped with sidewalks or trails.

More parents drive, which adds traffic, making the area more hostile to pedestrians.

An estimated 40% of K-8 students in Washington are driven to school by parents. Others take a school bus or transit, and only 12% walk and bike, state surveys say.

The Kent School District faced some unique problems, especially in serving the Grandview Apartments, a large affordable housing complex just over a half-mile south of campus.

In March , the school district and city of SeaTac announced and missed a self-described aggressive goal to deliver sidewalks last fall, in a stretch just north of the Kent-SeaTac city boundary. It’s taken awhile to acquire strips of private land by the roadside, the city says.

New sidewalks will be ready by Aug. 23, promises David Bussard, operations and facilities director for Kent schools. That’s a stretch, since bidding hasn’t occurred.

“We have to have the sidewalk completed for the first day of school,” he said.

It could take a couple of months longer to install small trees, drainage and walkway lights.

A large share of Grandview kids are driven, especially on rainy days, Bussard said. Of River Ridge’s 674 students, 174 either live close enough to walk, or are beyond the school’s bus service area, the district said.

Nationally, the proportion of K-8 students who walk or bike declined from 48% in 1969 to 13% in 2009, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which considers active transportation a way to help children stay healthy. The walk-bike share increases to 18% where projects such as walkways, traffic slowdowns and signals were added in four states including Washington, a study found.

A military road

Military Road dates to 1857, funded by a $35,000 congressional grant with support from then-U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to connect Fort Steilacoom to Fort Bellingham. A century later, a Nike missile defense base was built on the hill above Kent to deter Soviet attacks. Today, part of the former base is an off-leash dog park behind the new school. The 261-unit Grandview Apartments opened in 2017, signaling infill growth.

Why no sidewalks?

Bussard said if fingers must be pointed, “It’s all on me.”

In early plans, the elementary was to be a bus-only school, because it replaced a smaller academy where practically nobody walked, he recalled. Voters approved River Ridge as part of a 2016 property-tax levy.

The road complied with Washington school zone guidelines, according to Bussard. Speed limits are below 40 mph, the shoulder is 5 feet wide, and the road is only two lanes wide. (The city of SeaTac, which set a 35 mph limit, provides a flashing 20 mph sign for arrival and dismissal times, but not automated camera enforcement like Seattle.) School buses didn’t make sense for the apartment residents, because of limited resources and the congestion, he said.

Still, it seemed obviously unsafe after the grand opening. The district acknowledged heavy traffic, sent extra staff out temporarily, then installed short curbs as a slight measure of protection.

“We heard from our public and our parents. We listened to our community: ‘We need to have a path to the school.’ ” Bussard said.

The district proposed building a shortcut using the perimeter of the 37-acre dog park, and to include fencing and a segment through the parking lot. But the city of SeaTac opposed that path, after hearing from Dogs of Grandview Supporters, a nonprofit that maintains the dog park.

“It would not be suitable under ANY conditions to build a school walk trail in the park” for the safety of students as well for dogs, Elynn Miller Clayton, president of DOGS, said by email. “They taunt the dogs, throw rocks at dogs and park users, prop the gates open so dogs can escape.”

Students have dropped candy toxic to dogs, or stuck their fingers through fences, she said.

The city and school staff opted for sidewalks, which will be divided from the road by a row of trees and new streetlamps. The city will contribute $500,000 and staff time, while the school district funds the rest of the estimated $2 million project.

SeaTac Mayor Jake Simpson said that when he campaigned door to door, voters cited missing or hazardous pedestrian routes as a top complaint, just behind high rents.

Vinson said the temporary curbs don’t shield kids from traffic.

“They walk on the curbs, and semitrucks will go by with their mirrors out,” he said. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

A speed-display sign showed some drivers going 37 to 38 mph at 4:20 p.m. when most kids were gone, but the 20 mph flashers still blinked. A pickup hit the curb. Heavy trucks sometimes pass from the state’s I-5/Highway 509 interchange project.

“I wouldn’t let my 7-year-old walk over there,” Simpson said. “I understand their frustration.”

In the meantime, traffic police are an option, SeaTac staff say.

It’s a movement

Washington state ranks third for school walk-bike conditions behind California and Massachusetts, according to the Safe Routes Partnership.

Washington excels in state funding but ranks low for school locations and design.

Residential sprawl, along with the desire to place campuses on large, inexpensive parcels, tends to result in sites distant from neighborhoods, or along high-speed rural roads.

“It’s been a trend nationally, for a number of years, that schools are being pushed to these outer areas,” said Michelle Lieberman, the group’s consulting director based in Orange County, California.

Many communities, like SeaTac, are remediating their school routes.

Communities filed more than $200 million worth of requests for an existing $35 million in a Washington state school routes fund in 2023-25, said Charlotte Claybrooke, active transportation manager for the Washington State Department of Transportation.

There’s no database of inadequate school zones, but one barometer is that 165 school projects applied for state grants. Claybrooke mentioned Amboy Middle School in Clark County, Toutle Lake School in Cowlitz County and Dixie Elementary School in Walla Walla County, all next to highways, as campuses without sidewalks.

Shoreline School District’s Meridian Park Elementary, on a campus first developed 65 years ago, will finally gain sidewalks along four-lane North 175th Street near I-5, during a city street makeover in final engineering.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, with encouragement by Councilmember Debora Juarez, allocated $525,000 to build sidewalks in 2024 on a dirt shoulder of Northeast 95th Street, linking the Ryther center campus to Lake City Way transit, after alumnus Charlie Howe, who has low vision, rallied community support.

SeaTac will add sidewalks at the Highline district’s Madrona Elementary, with construction to start in late 2024.

“We have multiple projects and are really taking our commitment to students and complete streets seriously,” public works director Will Appleton said.

Seattle continues to add automated speed-enforcement cameras, at 19 schools, that are expected to generate $13.9 million this year for future school zone safety upgrades.

Motorists, industries and consumers will pay more to make walking conditions safer.

Move Ahead Washington, the $17 billion package passed last year by the Legislature, is supposed to double the school safe routes fund, by adding $290 million through 2037. Pedestrian safety of all kinds will receive $1.1 billion, primarily financed by carbon taxes.

Within the 25,000-student Kent School District, there are a few elementary schools where everybody walks, some with mixed travel options and some sites where are all bused, Bussard said.

More people will arrive as the former missile base and other properties are developed near River Ridge, filling it to its 900-student capacity, just as the farms surrounding Kent-Meridian High School in 1951 became apartments, Bussard said.

“I am very excited to get this sidewalk done, and make sure that every child that walks on Military Road will be safe from traffic.”