A bike garden in Vancouver will have its grand opening next month. Also known as traffic gardens, these types of spaces help children and adults practice bike and road safety in a controlled environment.
Will Grimm is the lead design and project manager for the Heights Bike Garden. Fionnuala Quinn is the director of Discover Traffic Gardens and consulted on the project. They join us with details.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: There will be a grand opening for a new bike garden in Vancouver next weekend. These spaces, which are also known as traffic gardens, help children or adults practice bike and road safety in a controlled environment. Will Grimm is the lead design and project manager for this Heights Bike Garden. Fionnuala Quinn consulted on it as the director of Discover Traffic Gardens. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Fionnuala, can you just describe what a bike garden or a traffic garden is? I gave the one sentence version, but you’ve literally written books about them.
Fionnuala Quinn: Yes, it’s a many-street network that’s free of motor vehicles with transportation features that’s intended as a space that’s free of motor vehicles that dedicated to new learners, usually children, where they can practice biking. But it’s not the real world, it’s a scaled down version.
Miller: Will, what is the one that you have helped design? What’s it going to look like?
Will Grimm: Tactical urbanism is part of our design process and bike gardens is one of those that really lends itself to communication of what Fionnuala is talking about. Things that activate a space that’s for under utilized lands. This bike garden is very large and it occupies a space of an old mall that we’ve now demoed. But development will not be there until a year and a half. So as you can imagine, we have tons of land and parking space. We have two blocks ‒ let’s say Portland blocks ‒ of networks of streets and right-of-ways and roundabouts.
Miller: Except when you say streets and right-of-ways this is painted on what is currently just a parking lot, a paved area? You’re painting a design that approximates all of the road network.
Grimm: Exactly, it approximates the lanes, stop signs, yield signs, roundabouts, what we call shark teeth.
Miller: What are those?
Grimm: Fionnuala can talk a little bit more about this, but those are the warning symbols that allow you to yield. Like, a moment where you need to slow down, pay attention, there’s oncoming bike traffic and there are areas where you can pull over and work on your bike and there are buildings within this. So they’re flat, obviously horizontal murals where kids can imagine themselves riding through cities.
Miller: Fionnuala, is it a game that kids know how to play? I mean, if you’re just biking along and there’s a 2-D painting of streets and stop signs and buildings, nothing literally stops you from driving on top of a building. Do kids intuitively know what to do here?
Quinn: I would not say it’s a game. It’s fun. It’s learning fun in a very forgiving environment. One of the issues for children learning all these skills they need to – how to bike, how to interact with traffic, how to interact with the other users of the space – is it’s not very forgiving.
Miller: That is a very gentle way to put it. There are SUVs with gigantic grills that would kill any of us in a second.
Quinn: So how do you learn? For many children in the U.S., there really isn’t a great space close to their home to just learn the basics that you learn over time. You don’t learn it all at once. So by having a representation of the space that we put in as many of the real traffic features as possible, they recognize [it] as representing the traffic world, but where they can make errors. They’re not errors.
We put a lot of arrows on the street because they’re riding on the other side of the street and their pals say, “oh, go to the other side.” It sort of self-corrects, they start to learn and realize when they drive [or] ride outside the lines, nothing’s going to happen. But they recognize right away what this is.
Even tiny kids, they see it because we’ve tried to make it look as trafficky as possible and they just go riding off. But typically, they may be on the wrong side of the street, they may not know what to do at the intersection, but that’s the learning that can be used for play, but can actually also go into schools and other places where kids are being taught, and they learn. They learn very quickly, of course.
Miller: Will, at the beginning, you said that this is an example of tactical urbanism. What does that mean? What does that phrase mean?
Grimm: It’s a very focused, deliberate, intentional way to create place that is typically interim, short term. It’s to promote positive change, and usually a future development is coming. We’re waiting. There’s an action plan, a long term plan. Tactical urbanism is a short term implementation tool to start to see something move, something happening on the sites. Sometimes it is just underutilized land, it needs help, something needs to be activated there. Neighborhoods are surrounding this traffic garden. This place is going to be as-is for a while. So this activation space is going to be such a positive playground, traffic garden, and educational tool for a long time.
Miller: Is it being used for anything right now?
Grimm: No. I mean, there are some businesses along the road, but behind where Tower Mall used to live, it’s just blank.
Miller: And we didn’t say this. When we talked to the Vancouver mayor, we talked briefly about this project, but can you just remind us what this is going to be in the future? This is a kind of interim use of an underused space now. But what is the final plan for it?
Grimm: An equitable development, that’s what our aspirations are. That includes anything from inclusive streetscapes, inclusive city experiences, mobility, transportation systems that are diverse, mixed income housing, affordable housing, anti displacement strategies, getting those existing businesses on site inside the new community as well, various typologies of housing integrated in with the neighborhood. [We’re] working really hard to create an equitable model for development over time.
Miller: So eventually this two block area that is about to be opened as a new urban park for kids to practice biking and to be around, it’s going to be part of not-yet-built development that has housing –
Grimm: Actually, it will go away.
Miller: What do you mean by that?
Grimm: Tactical urbanism in its nature is a testing ground for behavioral change. Sometimes they are plazas, parks, sometimes they stay, but most of the time they are a testing place for what is actually coming. This intervention will be removed because development will replace it, but we can move it because it’s paint. Eventually – and this is sometimes the hard part – communities fall in love with these spaces and then you have to talk to them about how do we create [or] duplicate this in a different area or a place where it can stay forever?
Miller: Fionnuala, am I right that a lot of traffic gardens or bike gardens are smaller to begin with, they’re not two city block size, but they are intended to be permanent?
Quinn: Yes. And you mentioned briefly they’ve been around in the U.S. for a long time. Many of them were actually built as real little cities with real streets and curbs and buildings, but that was actually a very expensive model that was popular in the seventies and eighties. And we haven’t been doing that since. Now we have all these great new surface-applied products that are much more vibrant, that last longer. They have all these good properties like they’re solar reflective. People are already seeing those products because they’re seeing the green lanes on the street and the red bike lanes. Those products are allowing us to make these painted representations that can be really vibrant. And it’s much easier to paint this representation of a small world than the old way of actually building the streets. Kids love those. I would love to be involved in one of those, but that’s an awful lot of money. So instead people are doing these. One of the big things is they’re starting to show up in entire school systems. Anywhere you have a hard surface that’s mostly flat and often underutilized it can then be transformed into a traffic garden and it’s a very flexible concept. As long as you meet the basic rules, that it’s bikeable and it makes sense traffic wise, people are very creative in how they actually do them.
Miller: Few people I think have positive connotations of the word traffic. I mean, it’s not what I think of as wanting to see blooming in a garden. Does the name ever get in the way of your overall project?
Quinn: The name actually came back from Europe and it came back in a federal document. It’s the only place where in the federal documents we talk about these installations. They call them traffic gardens and it’s “garten” as in kindergarten – a place of learning. And of course, the word traffic – we associate it with cars, but it’s actually about mobility and movement, it covers everybody.
So the really important thing about the name is that it’s organizing them all. They were out there forever, but they were all hyperlocal projects and they all had different names. And people can still call them any name. In Vancouver, it’s a bike garden. They go under all sorts of names. I’ve tracked about 30 names in English and they’re all variations of the words bike, park, transport, children, which makes them very hard to find. So they weren’t recognized as a single thing.
By unifying them under a single name we’re able to organize them. Now I have a global map showing 800 of them. I have a North American map showing 270. And what that has allowed us to do is something that had never happened before, which is initiate research. Penn State University took the list of the 270 traffic gardens and went out and contacted them all. So they all have different names, but by having a unifying name, we can now recognize them, we can research them, and we can start to really understand what’s happening in them. But yeah, people use all sorts of different names. But the important thing is that we can find each other and we can start to have standards, share information, all the things that a name helps you do.
Miller: How much do kids bike these days compared to 20 or 30 or 50 years ago?
Quinn: Ok, this is the news. There has been a precipitous drop in U.S. children learning the skill of biking. It has been documented at around 60% in the last 15 years.
Miller: Just in 15 years?
Quinn: Yeah, it’s based on data from the American Community Survey and for between the exact ages of five and 15. Dr. Ralph Buehler is the person who analyzed the data and found that. He realized right away this was big. So he got in touch with the bike manufacturers selling children’s bikes and he was able to back that up. And people like myself and others who I talk to who were all working in the world of children and biking, we had been hearing lots of things. We knew something was going on. Because you’d go to see a safety Village that had been therev for decades and they’d say, “Well, we used to put all the third graders on bikes, but now we put them on scooters because so many of them don’t know how to bike.” So we knew there was something going on. Interestingly it’s beyond the U.S. There’s data coming from Europe saying the same thing.
Miller: Do you know what’s behind this?
Quinn: I can speculate. One of the things is we left it to families. Leaving it to families assumed they had the time and the resources to buy equipment that you have to maintain, and that they had the safe places to bring a child and teach them this skill. It’s work to teach them and it turns out it actually works better in a group environment, a school setting, or some sort of after school setting. Kids learn faster that way.
Miller: But one of the key things that families have no control over and a school has not too much control over is the overall environment. And, and if it’s not safe for people to bike there, if they don’t feel like it’s safe, what’s the point in biking at all?
Quinn: Well, we aspire to a built world that will be safe and there’s tremendous work going on in Portland and in all our U.S. cities right now to make those worlds safer. We don’t know where a child is going to live when they grow up, [but] they need basic skills, mobility skills, to get around. And when they’re young is the time to lock those in. So the kids are getting skills which they will need wherever they live. But we also do aspire to have built worlds where we will be able to walk, bike, use all sorts of other mobility devices to get around. There’s a lot of work going on in that area. One of the things we do with traffic gardens is actually involve children in the design of streets so they actually think about how you get around and they understand the work that’s going on on the streets.
Miller: Will, when the actual development is finally in and this bike garden is gone, will the development itself be a safe place for kids to bike?
Grimm: Absolutely. And this is the beauty of the bike garden. We’re teaching families and kids the safety of how to ride and how to be aware of yourself when you’re riding because that type of bike network, an extensive network of bike mobility lanes, is coming. They will recognize that, they will see the signage, the signals, the color, the contrast. It will not be a foreign object on the road. They will have at least some comfort level.
Miller: Will Grimm and Fionnuala Quinn, thanks very much.
Grimm: Thank you. Appreciate it.
Quinn: Thanks, Dave. Thank you.
Miller: Will Grimm is lead design and project manager for this new Heights Bike Garden that is opening a week from tomorrow. Fionnuala Quinn is director of Discover Traffic Gardens and one of the consultants for this project.
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