The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century mandated that the Secretary of Transportation commission the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council to examine available crash injury data, along with vehicle design and driver training requirements and routing, operational, and other relevant factors, to study "the safety issues attendant to the transportation of school children to and from school and school-related activities by various transportation modes." If data were deemed unavailable or insufficient, a new data collection regimen and implementation guidelines were to be recommended. This report, prepared by the 14-member Committee on School Transportation Safety, attempts to fulfil this mandate by assessing the relative risks of each major mode used for school travel and providing insights into the potential effects on safety of changes in the distribution of school trips by mode. The report is organised in six chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introduction. A brief description of the national datasets (NPTS, GES, and FARS) used by the committee in its risk assessment is provided in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, risk measures based on injury and fatality rates calculated using the national data described in Chapter 2 are developed. In Chapter 4, five categories of risk factors associated with school travel are presented, and safety checklists that can be used by decision makers to identify intervention opportunities for addressing those factors are provided. Three scenarios involving hypothetical schools are offered in Chapter 5 to demonstrate how quantitative analyses in the risk management framework can be applied and to illustrate how changes in transportation policy can affect the overall risk for a particular school. The committee's findings and its recommendations to federal, state, and local policy makers and administrators for reducing risks and enhancing safety for students travelling to and from school are contained in Chapter 6.
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