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Should February be the month when we pause to recognize the love of place, topophilia? It's not a sentiment that we value greatly but here at Traffic Gardens HQ, we do love introducing the built world to children so they will be inspired to become closer observers of the place where they live. Our most exciting projects have been where kids have been directly involved in redesigning a place and seeing it come to life as a real-life traffic garden. Kids get to imagine change and see an under-used place transformed for community use through application of thoughtful ideas. Knowing that they played a role is a rare type of involvement for children and something we could be engaging in much more.
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Back where I'm originally from, February 1st marked the first day of spring. Spring can't come soon enough this year but right now here in Virginia, it's that bit too cold to go outside and install traffic gardens. We're missing involving kids in these traffic gardens as they are a small world where they start thinking about how we put street elements together. Instead, we're staying close to home and involved in a lot of writing that we hope will transfer into useful guidance and tips. The dream is that this useful stuff will get into the hands of families and communities and help them in enhancing the built world for our youngest members.
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2020: The Year of the Temporary Traffic Garden
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One significant recent evolution has been temporary or semi-permanent traffic gardens. While pop-ups were already a thing (think Open Streets and safety town summer camps), this application is a new twist. Once we settled in for the long-haul, clusters of temporary traffic gardens sprang up in Oregon, Colorado and Virginia plus there were other installations in NY, IA, CA, ID and more.
Because a temporary traffic garden is a quick and easy project, it can be accomplished with a group of volunteers and a tiny budget using hardware store equipment and products. Once folks had one site completed, they transferred their new-found skills and supplies to the next site and it became hard to keep up. Layouts were created using everything from washable or removable materials (vinyl tape, duct tape, spray chalk, tempera paint) to longer-lasting products like spray marking paint (like the products used by utility companies marking streets or in sport field applications). These were not the kind of traffic gardens that involved lengthy planning efforts: instead community volunteers, departments of transportation staffers and Safe Routes to School (SRTS) coordinators cobbled together teams and figured out how to install the lines and markings.
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There was a huge pent-up desire to create outdoor opportunities and destinations for kids who were not attending physical school and sites were found in parks, school parking lots and local patches of asphalt. Teams were doing entire installations in the space of a morning and kids were showing up right away with bikes and scooters. Some were preparing AutoCAD and InDesign layouts while others had hand-drawn sketches or were just designing on the surface. The installations were lasting for weeks and months with many still going strong. Rick Holt's tape and tempera installation from September 20 is still going strong mid-February despite a snowy VA winter. I hand my hand in my share here in VA and it is a lot of physical work (think bending over and over) but the return is amazing.
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The various efforts were in loose contact and it was during this time that I created the 20-page guide to provide a quick source for layouts and installation tips. The largest cluster was in and around Portland with several simultaneous efforts:one was led by the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) and another by local PE teacher, Sam Balto. Here's an online map that of the Portland installations.
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Soon after the Portland region took off, the Boulder Valley School District SRTS coordinator ,Amy Thompson, put together a team of school bus drivers and, at last count, they had installed 11 traffic gardens. It's well worth watching the video in this article about that effort and when I spoke to Amy a few weeks ago, the markings have survived through their snowy CO winter.
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Favorite videos about these temporary installations include this wonderful traffic garden explainer starring a 7-year old from PBOT and Sam Balto's whole story of the Roseway Heights Middle School installation told in 1 minute. Closer to home, I was mixed up with a team that installed a temporary (tape + spray chalk) installation in Arlington and next thing we were appearing in stories like this and this. Mobility Lab then followed with a great piece that goes into the broader picture. Small projects all making big local waves!
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Because it's February, we just had to make some ways to spread the traffic garden world love. Go ahead and print these valentines for your sweeties and new neighborhood pals. Download, print, and cut out at home, or post to social media. (We've made them nice and square for your Instagram feed!) Send to all your fellow STEM fans and corgi lovers:
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Traffic Garden - Temporary Materials Test
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With the flurry of temporary traffic gardens, questions arose about how long products lasted on outdoor surfaces as well as how readily they could be removed. There was limited experience with these questions within traffic garden circles plus there are so many variables due to the enormous differences in weather and temperatures around the U.S. Questions to manufacturers were not yielding answers that went much beyond "it depends on conditions and wear'.
Last newsletter, I mentioned that Rick Holt and I have set up a test site for temporary traffic garden materials in a parking lot at George Mason University to develop a better understanding of the performance of the temporary materials. Saturday November 21st, 2020, we installed 10 test plots (1 per parking spot). The materials being observed are duct tape; gaff tape; vinyl tape; temporary traffic striping tape; sidewalk chalk; spray chalk 1 (water-based); spray chalk 2 (pigmented paint); marking spray paint; tempera paint; and homemade chalk. Each was applied within a separate parking space so that they can be readily tracked and observed. We set up 'competing' materials in adjacent parking spots so appearance change could be compared. while we were at it, we also tried out a few different installation methods including a tape applicator and paint stripe floor marking stencils.
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Rick has been visiting the test site (via his new electric-assist bike) on a regular basis to make observations. We are about to hit the three month mark and plan to remove the materials that have survived at end of the fourth month. While not a true science project for lots of reasons but it is absolutely generating great information that is helping us better understand relative performances. We had high hopes for some materials which have disappointed while some other low-cost materials are proving to be workhorses. Final results soon.
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Those of of us who are passionate about safe streets for people have been celebrating the confirmation of new Secretary for Transportation, Pete Buttigieg. Knowing that he is a supporter of transit, vision zero and complete streets initiatives holds great promise and there's been a mad flurry of invites to have him join bike rides and the likes. Here at Traffic Garden HQ, we too harbor ambitions to showcase innovations and bring a few things to Secretary Buttigieg's attention. While it's a moonshot idea, we will be deploying our secret weapon, the annual Bloomsday Bike Ride in DC. Turns out, he is the son of a scholar of Joyce and last year he read from Ulysses for Irish Embassy Bloomsday celebrations. He is clearly already on the U.S. Bloomsday celebrations radar, but we will deploying the multiplier of [Bloomsday + Bikes] to try and get a foot in the door. Could be a multi-year effort but that's really nothing in transportation circles.
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Speaking of playing a long game, back when I set up The Bureau of Good Roads in 2015, I engaged my good pal, Maria Nicklin to create graphical elements so I could print stand-up cut-outs of bikes, people, street furniture, etc. on heavy card stock in large quantities at the lowest of cost. These have proved enormously useful over the years as it's important to stock street activities with real people using wheelchairs, strollers and canes to really consider how things work.
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Fast forward to 2021 and a FHWA project where I have been assisting just went live: buried inside the Safe Transportation for Every Pedestrian (STEP) STEM activities are some of my people cut-outs (scroll down a few pages) - it feels like running into old pals. Next newsletter I'll do a longer piece about the brand-new FHWA STEM materials as they are introducing kids to important ideas about how to redesign streets for safety.
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