Lauren Marchetti, Creator of National Walk and Bike to School Days, Retires after 52+ Years of Innovative Research to Advance Community, State, and National Practices

In April 2025, Lauren Marchetti officially retired from the UNC Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC) after an amazing 52 years, 7 months, and 24 days of total service to the state (and beyond).

Lauren most recently served as a senior strategic advisor focused on advancing safe walking and bicycling, with a focus on youth and children traveling to school. Prior to that, she served as director of the National Center for Safe Routes to School (2006-2016), and associate director of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (1999-2006), both housed at HSRC. Lauren’s project experience at HSRC was vast, ranging from promotion of child restraints and seat belts; efforts to deter drinking, driving, and speeding; and the promotion of safe walking and cycling. She led HSRC projects for many organizations including the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Federal Highway Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the North Carolina Governor’s Highway Safety Program, and more.

But this quick summary falls short of highlighting just how passionately Lauren worked to improve transportation safety in North Carolina, across the United States, and internationally. She was a creative, “out of the box” HSRC researcher who looked for innovative approaches to understand the science and people behind any transportation safety question she considered.

Walk to School Day. As part of a project for the U.S. Department of Transportation, Lauren established the Partnership for a Walkable America and worked with the National Safety Council to hold the first-ever National Walk to School Day event with Chicago’s Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1997. Her project team then joined with representatives from Canada and the United Kingdom to establish International Walk to School Day in 2000. This effort was recognized in 2002 with the Stockholm Challenge Award for Sustainable Cities. Under Lauren’s leadership, the National Center for Safe Routes to School, established National Bike to School Day in 2012. The events now known as Walk & Roll to School Day and Bike & Roll to School Day have grown in participation each year, and surveys of event coordinators indicate that more than half of events have inspired safety policy changes or engineering improvements in tens of thousands of communities.

Drinking on college campuses. Armed with relevant alcohol research experience, an amazing research team, and seed funding from the North Carolina Governor’s Highway Safety Program, Lauren approached NHTSA with an unsolicited idea: to investigate how knowing if and how much alcohol typical Carolina students consume influences the drinking behaviors and choices of other students at UNC.

“NHTSA’s Director of Behavioral Research, Richard Compton, didn’t think a university would agree to investigate the drinking problem in their own student population, but he decided it was worth the risk,” Lauren said, remembering the project. “I guaranteed him we could do it. I was in sales mode but confident because Rob Foss was going to design the experiment.”

Lauren and Dr. Rob Foss, a well-known behavioral research scientist at HSRC, worked together to get then UNC-CH Chancellor Michael Hooker to agree that HSRC should talk directly to Carolina students about drinking habits and collect Blood Alcohol Concentrations (BACs) from randomly selected students when they returned home at night. Carolina, with local researchers and state and federal project funding, was the first university in the U.S. to conduct this type of behavioral research.

“Making a program like this successful requires a lot of commitment and hard work to be sure it’s done right,” Rob said.  “Lauren was remarkably resourceful, and I was remarkably stubborn.”

The resulting NHTSA project, “Development and Evaluation of A Comprehensive Program to Reduce Drinking and Impaired Driving Among College Students,” conducted nighttime surveys and evaluated the “2 out of 3” awareness campaign. The basic message of the campaign, which was clear and easily understood by students, was: “Whether it’s Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, 2 out of 3 UNC students return home with a .00 BAC.” 

Ultimately, this research (summarized in this 2000 final report) transformed how the college drinking issue was both understood and approached by the safety community, which was only possible because of Lauren’s bold idea and the HSRC research team’s innovative approach to the problem.

Lauren’s smart, creative, ambitious (and sometimes wacky) approach to research and communication resulted in other unique HSRC project activities, too, such as creating child passenger safety and seat belt safety awareness campaigns. A particularly notable example featured UNC-CH, NBA, and all-around superstar Michael Jordan promoting seatbelts in the 90s. Earlier examples in the 80s featured the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wearing seatbelts, and the (then brand-new) Duke men’s basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, and his family promoting child passenger safety after their infant was protected by a car seat in a crash.

Other projects involved working with teens to develop anti-drinking and driving campaigns, and more recently, youth-led transportation safety activities. She also helped develop a national system for local schools to track travel data trends (known as the SRTS Data System), which earned a Harvard Bright Ideas in Government Award.

Perhaps more impressive than individual project and team successes, however, was her ability to adapt to and work across a variety of focus areas and priorities over her career. She certainly hasn’t had just one job for half a century, and she’s done it all in a research environment that has changed a lot.

“Priorities change, but being flexible and opportunistic is imperative,” Lauren said in a recent conversation.  “Part of it is following leadership at the federal and state level. but figuring out how to make something work at the local level was the biggest piece of the puzzle. And I loved that part of my work at HSRC.”

Tar Heel Born, Priceless Gem in Transportation Safety Research

No matter the topic area, Lauren’s ability to approach transportation safety topics with creativity and aplomb was impressive. And her ability to think differently and to take a new approach to a problem was invaluable to her projects and her colleagues, not to mention the state, throughout her career.

A Valdese native, Lauren’s work has impacted people and communities across her home state of North Carolina. From Elizabeth City and High Point, to Haywood and Bertie County, if you lived or traveled in NC at any point in the past 52 years, your life and safety has likely been impacted by Lauren Marchetti in some way.

Or maybe it’s the way Lauren actually did her work and how she worked with and supported her colleagues over the last half century that is her biggest accomplishment. Prioritizing great communication and mentorship is vital to great research, and it is Lauren’s legacy at HSRC, too.

Lauren credits Drs. BJ Campbell and Patricia Waller, two greats in the field of transportation safety research, as being fantastic mentors to her, but is reluctant to discuss the enormous impact she had on others. Her colleagues, past and present, however, are not so hesitant.

“You taught me about the understated and often overlooked part of road safety: messaging,” said David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the affiliated Highway Loss Data Institute and former Director of the UNC Highway Safety Research Center (2007-2018). “Thank you for teaching me how to be a better communicator…how to weave together the story of science and the impact on people in a way that would hopefully resonate with a variety of audiences.”

“You opened my eyes to the power of listening to understand, which over the years has helped me walk in and out of rooms that I would never have entered had I not learned that we all have common interests,” said Jeff Carmon, an attorney and former HSRC colleague. “If only we take the time to listen to what each other is saying, and to find out what each other holds dear.”

“You’re a big thinker: Walk to School Day, Bike to School Day, the Safe Routes to School Data System; big ideas that took big work,” said Nancy Pullen-Seufert, director of the National Center for Safe Routes to School and long-time HSRC colleague. “You have been relentless in your desire to understand the way the world works, and the way that people work. It has been a gift to work alongside you all of these years.”

Thank you for everything you’ve given to HSRC staff and research – your visionary thinking, diplomacy, persistence, intelligence, sense of humor, creativity, and warmth. We are truly grateful and our research is so much better thanks to all of your outstanding contributions.

May we never underestimate the value of fresh perspectives, good communication, and respect for the people involved with and behind the research.

Best of luck on this new road to retirement, Lauren. Take care and stay safe!

To learn more about National Bike to School Day, which is celebrated on the first Wednesday in May each year, visit www.walkbiketoschool.org.