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Safe School Design

Roadways and Parking

The movement of people and materials into, through, and out of a school facility is determined by the design of its access, circulation, and parking systems. Such systems should be designed to maximize efficiency while minimizing conflicts between vehicle and pedestrian modes. Designers should begin with an understanding of the school's transportation requirements based on an analysis of how the school will be used. This includes studying the number and types of access points that are required, bus requirements, the parking volume needed, where users need to go to and from, and the modes of transportation they will use. Several aspects of transportation planning can impact security and are discussed below.

Roadway network design. Streets are generally designed to minimize travel time and maximize safety, with the end result typically being a straight path between two or more endpoints. Although a straight line may be the most efficient course, designers should use caution when orienting streets relative to school buildings requiring high protection. Designers should design a roadway system to minimize vehicle velocity, thus using the roadway itself as a protective measure. This is accomplished through the use of several strategies.

First, straight-line or perpendicular approaches to school buildings should not be used in a school at high risk, because these give vehicles the opportunity to gather the speed necessary to ram through protective barriers and crash into or penetrate buildings. Instead, approaches should be parallel to the façade, with berms, high curbs, appropriate trees, or other measures used to prevent vehicles from departing the roadway. A related technique for reducing vehicle speeds is the construction of serpentine (curving) roadways with tight-radius corners. Existing streets can be retrofitted with barriers, bollards, swing gates, or other measures to force vehicles to travel in a serpentine path. Again, high curbs and other measures should be installed to keep vehicles from departing the roadway in an effort to avoid these countermeasures.

Less radical than these techniques are traffic calming strategies, which seek to use design measures to cue drivers as to the acceptable speed for an area. These include raised crosswalks, speed humps and speed tables, pavement treatments, bulbouts, and traffic circles. In addition to creating a more pedestrianfriendly environment, which increases "eyes on the street" surveillance, designing roadways to physically limit speeds can have the added benefits of increasing safety and, subsequently, lowering liability. Designers should be aware, however, that many of these techniques can have detrimental effects for emergency response, including slowing response time, interfering with en route emergency medical treatment, and increasing the difficulty of maneuvering fire apparatus. They also may present problems for snow removal, and their outer ends should remain flat so that bicycles can proceed unimpeded.

Parking. Parking restrictions can help to keep potential threats away from a school building. In urban settings, however, curbside or underground parking is often necessary and sometimes difficult to control. Mitigating the risks associated with parking requires creative design measures, including parking restrictions, perimeter buffer zones, barriers, structural hardening, and other architectural and engineering solutions. The following considerations may help designers to implement parking measures for schools that may be at high risk:

• Locate vehicle parking areas away from school buildings to minimize blast effects from potential vehicle bombs.
• Provide separate parking areas for students, faculty, staff, and visitors who may be going in and out during the school day. (This allows the main student parking lot to be closed off during the school day.)
• If possible, locate visitor or general public parking near, but not on, the site itself. Locate general parking in areas that provide the fewest security risks to school personnel.
• Consider one-way circulation within a school parking lot to facilitate monitoring for potential aggressors.
• Locate parking within view of occupied school buildings while maintaining stand-off.
• Prohibit parking within the stand-off zone.
• Request appropriate permits to restrict parking in the curb lane for school vehicles or key employee parking only where distance from the building to the nearest curb provides insufficient setback, and compensating design measures do not sufficiently protect the building from the assessed threat.
• If necessary, use structural features to prevent parking.
• Provide appropriate setback from parking on adjacent properties, if possible. Structural hardening may be required if the setback is insufficient. In new designs, it may be possible to adjust the location of the school building on the site to provide adequate setback from adjacent properties.
• When establishing parking areas, provide emergency communications systems (e.g., intercom, telephones, etc.) readily identified, well-lighted, CCTV monitored locations permit direct contact with security personnel.
• Provide parking lots with CCTV cameras connected to the security system and adequate lighting capable of displaying and videotaping lot activity.
• If possible, prohibit parking beneath or within a school building.
• If parking beneath a building is unavoidable, limit access to the parking areas and ensure they are secure, well-lighted, and free of places of concealment.
• Apply the following restrictions If parking within a school building is required:
  • Public parking with identification (ID) check
  • School vehicles and school employees and students only
  • Selected school employees only, or those requiring security