the specific countermeasures that compose Safe Routes to Schools programs may affect child pedestrian safety. OBJECTIVE A key point of departure for this work is that it explicitly distin- guishes between “perceived safety,” which is a subjective view of the likelihood of being involved in a crash and serves as the basis for a parent’s decision to permit a child to walk or bike to school, and “substantive safety,” which is a child’s actual likelihood of being involved in a crash. While there may be some correlation between perceived and substantive safety, safety problems can emerge when programs create a false sense of security (i.e., when they minimize the perception of risk of a crash or injury without also reducing the actual probability of one). For safety to be a meaningful part of Safe Routes to Schools programs, the strategies believed to enhance safety—and thus to increase rates of walking and bicycling—should also be associated with reductions in the incidence of crashes involving child pedestrians. To date, substantive discussions of traffic safety are largely absent from the Safe Routes to Schools literature. To the extent to which safety is considered at all, the focus is on perceived safety, as mani- fested through reported changes in the rates of walking and bicycling among children (5–7 ). The objective of this review is to summarize what is known about the substantive safety effects of the specific countermeasures that compose Safe Routes to Schools programs, as well as to identify what is not known. This paper thus aims to serve as both a practical resource for those seeking to prioritize Safe Routes to Schools investments on the basis of their substantive safety benefits and a guide for researchers seeking to advance the current evidence base on this important topic. SCOPE Safe Routes to Schools programs are commendable for their com- prehensive approach to addressing child pedestrian safety, with most established programs integrating a host to strategies culled from the three E’s of traffic safety: engineering, enforcement, and education. An exhaustive review of any one of the three E’s would span the dis- ciplines of traffic engineering, city planning, child education, public health, traffic psychology, and law enforcement in both national and international contexts and could easily constitute a book-length review. The objective of this paper is not to cover this literature exhaustively. Instead, it focuses exclusively on empirical research that examines how the specific countermeasures that compose Safe Routes to Schools programs affect the incidence of vehicle– pedestrian crashes involving children and on empirical studies that Traffic Safety and Safe Routes to Schools Synthesizing the Empirical Evidence Eric Dumbaugh and Lawrence Frank 89 Safe Routes to Schools programs are an increasingly popular means of addressing parental concerns about traffic safety and encouraging par- ents to permit their children to walk and bicycle to school. While there has been a good deal of recent research examining the health and physical activity benefits associated with these programs, there has been little sys- tematic examination of the effects these programs may have on the actual safety of child pedestrians. This paper summarizes the existing empirical evidence on the behaviors known to lead to crashes involving child pedes- trians, as well as the effects that 10 safety countermeasures commonly incorporated into Safe Routes to Schools programs have on both the inci- dence of crashes involving child pedestrians and the behaviors known to result in such crashes. The paper finds that many safety benefits associ- ated with these countermeasures are assumed rather than known and that there are substantial gaps in the existing knowledge about the specific safety effects of the components of Safe Routes to Schools programs. It concludes by identifying opportunity areas for future research on this important topic. To reduce the rising number of overweight and obese children in the United States, many planners and public health officials are increas- ingly promoting active modes of travel for the journey to school. While regular walking or bicycling to school has the ability to enhance health and reduce weight (1, 2), it also raises concerns about expos- ing children to vehicular crashes. Each year roughly 600 pedestrians and bicyclists under the age of 16 are killed in motor vehicle crashes (3), and another 30,000 are seriously injured (4), making many parents reluctant to allow their children to walk or bike to school. To address parental concerns about traffic safety, many states, cities, and other communities have adopted Safe Routes to Schools pro- grams, which aim to enhance child pedestrian safety during the school trip. Yet, despite the growing popularity of these programs, there has been little consideration of how these programs relate to the incidence of crashes involving child pedestrians. Most studies and reports that have examined Safe Routes to Schools programs have focused largely on whether these programs are effective at increasing rates of walk- ing and bicycling, without considering what their actual effects on child pedestrian safety might be (5–10). Given the absence of mean- ingful information on the safety effects of Safe Routes to Schools pro- grams, this paper examines the current state of the knowledge on how E. Dumbaugh, Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, 3137 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3137. L. Frank, School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, 235-1933 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2, Canada. Corresponding author: E. Dumbaugh, edumbaugh@tamu.edu. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2009, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2007, pp. 89–97. DOI: 10.3141/2009-12