Help Make School Routes Safer — Join Your Provo School’s Community Council

Why Join the Community Council?

Joining your School Community Council is an easy way to have an outsized voice in improving safe routes for walking, biking, and scooting to your neighborhood schools.

Every elementary, middle, and high school has a School Community Council made up of parents and faculty. These councils make key decisions for the school, including one particularly important task: submitting a Safe Routes to School Plan to the Provo City Engineer.

These plans include requests for the city to improve infrastructure – such as bike/scooter lanes, crosswalks, and school zones – to make routes to school safer for children and families.

This is an already-existing, formalized process for getting walking and biking infrastructure on the city’s radar. It also gives city engineers more leverage in budget debates to advocate for improvements. Yet many parents have never heard of it. We want to change that.

The author and his family on a bike ride in Provo.

How to get involved

1. Within the first month of school, look out for an email calling for volunteers to join the Community Council.

2. If you don’t hear anything in the first few weeks, contact the school directly. In many cases, few people even know about the council, and all it takes is volunteering to get a seat.

3. If there are more volunteers than open seats, an election will be held. Don’t worry – it’s simple: you’ll write a brief paragraph about why you want to join, and parents will vote online.

4. Being able to name a few clear goals for Safe Routes to School can help your application stand out.

The Safe Routes Plan is due every fall, so it’s typically one of the first priorities for a newly formed council. For some councils, this is treated as a box-checking task – but it can be so much more.

Having even one person who cares about active transportation and student safety makes a difference. In my experience, suggestions like “What if we added a crosswalk here?” or “Why don’t we change this to make it safer?” were met with genuine interest – people just hadn’t thought of it yet.

What if you’re not elected?

That’s okay—all Community Council meetings are open to the public. You won’t have a vote, but in my experience, most council members are receptive to ideas from engaged parents.

Schools sometimes announce meeting dates, but not always. If you don’t see an announcement, just call the school office and ask when the next meeting will be, and when Safe Routes will be discussed. It might not be typical for non-council members to attend, but these meetings are legally required to be public.

The Bigger Picture

Imagine the good that could happen if a BikeWalk Provo advocate sat on every school community council. Just a few people could have a powerful influence on local infrastructure—and make our schools, streets, and neighborhoods safer for everyone.

How to Live on a Bike

“But how am I going to get around without a car?! I NEED to drive!”

Well, it might not be as bad as you think. I’ve been getting around Provo (and beyond) without a car for the last two-and-a-half years. It has been very fulfilling.

I enjoy it, and I definitely don’t miss the driving and the parking and the insurance and the registration and the fuel and the traffic. I don’t miss worrying about breaking down or about somebody crashing into me or about me causing death or damage to somebody else. I don’t miss being enclosed in a padded metal box as I move from parking lot A to parking lot B.

I know that I’m not you, and that your life isn’t the same as mine. But I am going to share some things from my experience. I hope that it will help at least a few of you.

One low-cost bike setup the author experimented with for winter riding from 2019 through 2020

I started going car-light two years before I stopped driving altogether, and it was another year after that before I went all in by getting rid of my car—a car that had become my (not so) mobile storage unit.

In early 2021 I decided to do a big bike trip, something that I hadn’t done before. Like, biking from Provo to Denver kind of big. I had six months to prepare, and I decided that the first thing to do was to start biking everywhere to figure out the logistics of it all and to build up my strength and endurance.

I didn’t have a super dialed bike or a nice setup at this point. I just rode what I had on hand while I researched and put together the bike that I would use for my trip.

Unplanned grocery run

Biking to SLC for Christmas (1 of 2)

Biking to SLC for Christmas (2 of 2)

So how did it go?

I learned a lot about living on a bike just by doing it (I’m referring to regular life, not the big trip). As I went places by bike rather than by car, I learned what worked for me and what didn’t. And while I recognize that I am more mechanically adept than most people, I do believe that anybody can learn a great deal just by experimenting and by paying attention to the results.

Provo to Colorado bike trip, Flat Tops Wilderness Area

Lessons Learned

Start with what you have. Give yourself plenty of slack. Don’t expect to be perfect, or even to be very good at it. Don’t put unrealistic expectations on yourself. Just start, and you’ll learn how to live on a bike as you go, at your own pace.

Be yourself. Don’t think that you have to do it like anybody else. You don’t have to dress a certain way, or ride the same kind of bike as anybody else, or be as fast as anybody else, or go as far as anybody else, or carry as much stuff as anybody else. You’ll learn what works best for you just by trying it and by paying attention to what makes things easier and what makes things more difficult. You’ll develop your own style and your own systems that will be optimized for your own life.

Give yourself time to decide how well each element of your system works—mechanical components, clothing, timing, routes—all of it. While you are experimenting, your body will be getting used to the new things you are doing. Some parts that are difficult at first are going to get easier with time.

Bike used for the Colorado trip after a subsequent rebuild and ongoing experimentation

Make it fun. Enjoy the fresh air and the autonomy of getting around on your own power. Smile. Laugh. Look for and enjoy the beauty that surrounds you. Enjoy not paying for gas, and enjoy not having to worry about parking. See what you can do, and recognize your new skills and victories along the way.

Try it and see what happens. I believe in you.