A Student Street is a contiguous route to school that is safe, convenient, and attractive. Student Streets are the guideway of the DSR, and their purpose is to maximize the number of students using active transportation daily.
Students are inventive in how they travel, always taking the most convenient route for them. In many neighbourhoods, this can mean venturing away from the ‘roadway’ and using other facilities like parks, institutional land, commercial areas, alleyways, and neighbourhood cut-throughs (both official and unofficial). Students connect these different land uses with their routes to school. Student Streets are our way of ensuring that these routes are identified, preserved, and improved so that more students will use them to get to and from school. It is also a way of informing the design of new communities and retrofitting of existing communities to improve mobility for children and others.
Different locations along a Student Street call for different measures to enhance safety, convenience, and attractiveness, such as:
- Complete Streets (when the Student Street parallels a roadway)
- School Streets (A street outside a school that is closed to automobile traffic during the morning and afternoon bell times)
- School zone designation
- Landscape architecture (when a Student Street enters a park or recreational trail)
