What's new in the streets

Though I've spent a fair amount of time either in my office or huddled around my laptop at home of late, helping out with the DML Competition, I have been reading a bit about what's going on IRL. Recent notes from the streets:

Streetsblog, a project of the Open Planning Project that seeks to re-focus policy and planning in New York toward pedestrians and bicyclists, had a great entry about the city's efforts to keep kids safe while using those streets, called Safety City. I reblog a bit of it here:

"An educational program for school children that combines classroom instruction with outdoor lessons on simulated life-sized streetscapes, six Safety City campuses are located throughout the boroughs.

"Negotiating West Harlem's narrow sidewalks, active road construction sites, and crosswalk signals so short that adult classroom volunteers had to block auto traffic with their bodies as kids scrambled across the street [emphasis in original], a group of third graders made its way to the W. 158th Street Safety City last spring for a day of so-called 'hands-on experience.'

...

"The children were directed to memorize a chant, to be recited mentally at every corner: 'Stop, look and listen. Make a safe decision.' The sloganeering was reinforced by the 'Safety City Rap,' a repetitive 'Barney'-esque video that seemed to serve mostly as a lunchtime babysitting tool. Not once during the day were students told of the rightful place of pedestrians in the urban environment, and not once was auto traffic depicted as anything other than an uncontrollable force of nature. [emphasis in original] The class eventually moved outside to the fenced Safety City streetscape, where every sidewalk was clear of obstructions, every crosswalk was freshly painted, every pedestrian signal worked perfectly, and no speeding vehicles could be found."

You can read the full entry here. I can't help but wonder whether it would be more effective, as a commenter there suggested, for the state of New York (and all others too; I wouldn't want to be a kid walking around in NC either!) to require licensed drivers to take "pedestrian awareness" of some sort. Safety City really sends the message to kids that it's their responsibility to navigate streets, even though drivers are the ones responsible for many of the incidents that Streetsblog reports each week. Oh well.

In happier urban exploration news, here's an unusual find, from some photographers exploring Los Angeles: a dumpster full of fortune cookies.