The Community Pedestrian Safety Training Program (CPST), funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS), was established in 2009 to help promote informed community awareness, advocacy, planning, and programming in reducing pedestrian injuries and fatalities. Originally considering pedestrian safety only, the program was expanded to include bicycle safety in 2016 and became known as the Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training Program (CPBST). The program is a statewide project of the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC), a research center created in collaboration with the Institute of Transportation Studies and the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and California Walks (Cal Walks), a nonprofit organization that specializes in promoting communities that are more just, inclusive, and walkable. SafeTREC and Cal Walks have worked with dozens of communities across California to develop localized recommendations to improve the safety of walking and biking in their respective communities. The CPBST includes a series of planning meetings and site visits that culminate in a community-centered workshop that details crash data trends, walking and biking assessments and includes programmatic and infrastructure strategies to ameliorate traffic safety concerns.
To help monitor program effectiveness and update the OTS on the effectiveness and progress of the program, SafeTREC conducts yearly surveys to assess the impact of and points of growth of CPBST workshops. These surveys gather feedback from local community members who, individually or through their organization, are instrumental in setting up the workshop in their community. These surveys generally glean their perceptions of the program’s effectiveness, the steps they observed were taken to promote safe walking and biking by their community in response to the workshop and their input on how the program could be improved. In response to the feedback gained through surveys, OTS allocated grant funding for SafeTREC to supplement feedback from an electronic survey to conduct case study interviews with past community partners to gain further insight into how the program can be strengthened or adapted to meet the needs identified from the interviews.
