Street engineering – after many years of prioritizing automobile speed here in the US – is evolving towards safe systems design that makes it difficult for drivers to speed or make a mistake that’s life threatening to others. But the narrative that pervades road safety education does not reflect these efforts.
For the last four decades, walking to school has been declining – a fact often brought up by the National Safe Routes to School Partnership and the University of North Carolina’s Pedestrian & Bicycle Information Center, just to mention a few. With the advent of the Internet, it is easy to bring up articles and […]
Halloween is the only nationally recognized event that specifically devotes an entire evening to kids getting outdoors with friends, all to have a good and silly time. That’s what childhood should be about, right? It should, but safety organizations and transportation departments across the country are busy printing flyers that ask kids to dress up […]
For teachers, it can be a day without lesson plans. For kids, it can be like the book fair; an exciting outdoor happening that escapes the dreary boundaries of the four classroom walls. Walk to School Day can be so many things all at once. For us, it is a reminder that walking is a […]
Last October, we brought this point up on Twitter: The word “pedestrian” needs a rethink. Today, we are giving these thoughts a more permanent home on the WalkSafe blog. Perhaps it may seem odd for a walking advocacy organization to criticize the word pedestrian. Many advocates – including ourselves – use the word to promote […]
Not long ago, we found ourselves engaged us in a discussion on Twitter – as a follow-up to our sticky streets article – whether the best streets in history were intentionally built with human enjoyment in mind. While we never did come to a conclusion, the discussion did bring something to mind: Parks remain one of […]
Somewhere between the desire to expand cities under ambiguous visions of progress and urbanists’ rally cry for more walkable streets sits this unassuming checkerboard painted on a table. That’s right: Checkers (or something like it) can make your city better. Lest you think we’ve completely lost our senses, hear us out: Advocates for more walkable […]
