Fixing Our Streets and Safe Routes to School

Learn how the voter approved Fixing Our Streets program funded $8 million worth of engineering projects to improve how Portland families access schools. Understand how projects were selected and view a map of funded locations.

A wrench standing upright entwined with a rose encompassed by a white hexagon. Title says Fixing Our Streets Your Dime at Work over a salmon pink background.

When Portland voters approved Measure 26-173, the ten-cent gas tax, in 2016, they created the Fixing Our Streets program and a major new funding source for Portland's Safe Routes to School (SRTS) initiative. Fixing Our Streets designated $8 million to build transportation projects that will help connect families to K-8 schools across Portland.

To assess which projects communities wanted most, our SRTS team talked with families and students about how they travel to school and how we could help make their journeys safer. With this input and the help of a Stakeholder Advisory Committee, we identified over 1,200 street safety projects to create a network connecting schools in every high school cluster across Portland.

The goals of this project planning included:

1. Identify Primary Investment Routes* leading to every permanent public elementary, K-8, and middle school campus in the city of Portland

2. Develop a prioritized list of infrastructure projects to improve safety and walking access along the Primary Investment Routes

3. Prioritize projects to be built in the near term with current funds available through Fixing Our Streets

*A Primary Investment Route is a street likely to have the most amount of students walking on it to access a school. SRTS projects will be focused on these streets to create complete, connected routes to a school throughout the entire "walkshed" of a campus neighborhood. A walkshed is the area within a 1-mile walking distance of elementary and middle schools, and 1.5 miles from high schools.

A white map of the Portland region, with colored dots signifying types of transportation projects identified for school safety improvements. — School communities identified over 1,200 projects that would improve their walking routes to school.

We have already started to build some of these projects and over the next five years will be building many more. We will also be working hard to identify more local, state and federal funding to build out the rest of the network.

Find details on projects, routes, and the process at SafeRoutesProjects.com.