Arlington County is obtaining $35,000 of assistance to style and design extra “traffic gardens” to help youngsters learn about website traffic protection.
Before this week, the National Funds Area Transportation Organizing Board (TPB) awarded $250,000 of consulting companies to five D.C.-place tasks with the intention of bettering “safety on the region’s roadways, particularly for its underserved communities.”
Just one of individuals is a joint undertaking from Arlington County and Prince George’s County to establish targeted visitors gardens at faculties.
“Traffic gardens are miniature transportation networks with common roadway aspects, in which little ones can wander, bike, and scoot to find out the procedures of the road and exercise their transportation protection expertise,” principal planner Christine Baker for Arlington’s Department of Environmental Providers writes to ARLnow.
The hope is that this task and the consulting expert services becoming granted will help build common advice and templates so that faculties can construct its have gardens on “any budget” using a selection of different elements and devices.
Arlington has experienced two the latest examples of short term university-based mostly website traffic gardens, just one at Important Elementary University in the Bluemont community and the other at Hoffman-Boston Elementary College in Arlington Look at. These educational facilities made use of frequent, everyday components — like spray bottles, measuring sticks, string, and chalk — to build the roadway.
“We anticipate that educational facilities will use the steering to assess the site visitors backyard garden structure possibilities for their possess web page,” suggests Baker. “Most educational institutions get advantage of underneath-utilized difficult surfaces outdoor, like blacktops, courts or other asphalt to generate much more long lasting assignments, though those people with fewer capacity can retrofit gymnasiums with tape to create pop-up visitors gardens.”
Baker also notes that young pupils can consider the classes discovered on these mini, safer roads and convey them again to their neighborhood.
“Traffic gardens not only support to educate youngsters on the transportation procedure now but instill security patterns and transportation values that final a life time,” Baker says.
The TPB, which operates below the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG), will in the coming months be employing a advisor in the that will be giving doing the job with the two counties on the challenge. It is unclear at this point when the Arlington faculties will have site visitors gardens installed.
The initiative suits in with the county’s Vision Zero initiative, a plan to get rid of transportation-related fatalities and severe injuries on county streets and trails inside of the upcoming ten years. This involves the new implementation of “slow zones” close to educational facilities.
“Our Vision Zero transportation protection plan is not just about engineering protection enhancements on our roadways. There is a significant emphasis on local community engagement and training all over security,” suggests Baker. “Traffic gardens are an wonderful way to educate our community customers from a younger age to embrace risk-free transportation tactics.”
TPB authorised four other initiatives for funding in close by jurisdictions, all connected to road security and pedestrian improvements, together with in the Town of Alexandria, Fairfax County, Prince William County, and the City of Falls Church.