“Traffic Garden” Seeds Planted

Traffic department intern Ben Green wants to plant a new garden in the city, not to grow flowers or vegetables — but to cultivate a crop of safe young drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists.

Green, a 21-year-old rising Yale senior who’s spending his summer working for the city’s traffic and parking department, wants to create a ​“traffic garden.”

Also called a ​“traffic park” or ​“safety village,” a traffic garden is a miniature cityscape in which children can practice basic traffic skills, like sharing the road with bikes when in a car, crossing the street, using a traffic circle. Under supervision, children navigate traffic gardens on bikes or on foot or in scaled-down pedal-powered or mechanized cars.

Click the play arrow to see an example of a traffic garden in the city of Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

Green has drafted a proposal and had plans drawn up for what would be the first traffic garden in New England. Jim Travers, head of traffic and parking, said the next step is to look for grants to make it happen.

Green (pictured) said he was looking around for a way to educate kids on traffic safety —“That’s when you see the most success.” — when he came across the concept of a traffic garden. ​“It seemed like a really great idea.”

According to his proposal, traffic gardens have been shown to cut traffic-related injuries to children by half.

A traffic garden gives kids direct experience as a driver, a biker, and pedestrian, to see first-hand how the different modes of transport interact in practice, and what their different needs and dangers are, Green said.

In conceptual plans (pictured) drawn up by New Haven engineering firm CDM Smith, New Haven’s traffic garden would include all the traffic features one is likely to encounter in town: crosswalks, three-way and four-way stops, traffic lights, railroad tracks, bus stops, and bike lanes.

The garden would be staffed by New Haven police, who would educate groups of kids on school field trips, Green said. Acting as pedestrians, the children would learn things like making eye contact with a driver when you cross the street. As drivers, the children would learn how hard it can be to see a pedestrian when they step out into the street.

“You don’t want to bring a second-grader out to a real street” to show him these things, Green said. That’d be dangerous. A traffic garden offers a safe, contained environment to teach and learn, he said.

Green said the village could be funded not only by government grants, but by sponsorships from local businesses, who could have their facades recreated in miniature on the garden’s miniature city streets, or have their brand name emblazoned on the side of a little kiddie car.

The traffic department has not selected a site for the traffic garden. The example designs drawn up put the garden in a corner of Edgewood Park, across from Edgewood School at the corner of Yale and Edgewood avenues.