Skip to Content
Streetsblog California home
Streetsblog California home
Log In
Safety

How Dangerous Is the Driving Around Your Kids’ School?

Photo: Jim Henderson/Wikimedia Commons

Just how bad are the drivers that zoom past your children's school while they're walking to class? A new map from the driving behavior analytics company Zendrive can give you a better read.

The Zendrive mobile app tracks driver behaviors like speeding, hard stops, and usage of mobile devices. Here's how they pulled together the data for the school safety map:

Using our driving safety analytics technology, we mapped out areas around 75,000 schools nationwide and analyzed over 3.4 billion driver miles driven within them, giving us a very broad and accurate safety snapshot of April of 2017. We measured phone use while driving, as well as hard braking and fast acceleration, to get an idea of how safe the roads around schools really are. We came up with safety report cards (A+ through F, of course) for schools, counties, and states across the US.

Overall, Zendrive found that students at urban schools tend to be more exposed to dangerous driving behaviors. Here's where the five safest and five more dangerous schools were located:

The tech company Zendrive used data from drivers' phones to track dangerous driving around schools. Here is an overview. Photo: Zendrive
Image: Zendrive
false

More recommended reading today: The Transportist shares a study affirming that there's "safety in numbers" for people on bikes. And Streets.mn ponders one think tank's informed guesswork about the transition from car ownership to "transportation as a service" might play out.

Stay in touch

Sign up for our free newsletter

More from Streetsblog California

Friday’s Headlines

We did the headlines stack, but if you can find a way to join the ICE protests today, we encourage you too.

January 30, 2026

Open Letter: Hey BART, You Need to Fire This Driver

You expect people to approve funding measures? Then you can't have employees or contractors behaving like this on our dime.

January 29, 2026

Alhambra Approves New Pilot Bus Routes

City council knew rerouting wouldn’t please everyone, but eventually it passed 4-0. The bus network reconfiguration is projected to increase ridership 19%.

January 29, 2026

Thursday’s Headlines

Not all the news out of LA is bad news...

January 29, 2026

Improving Road Safety Is A Win For The Climate, Too

Closing the notorious "fatality target" loophole wouldn't just save lives — it'd help save the human species from climate catastrophe, too.

January 29, 2026
See all posts