Knoxville’s Safety City gives children a "hands-on" safety education within a child-size setting complete with buildings, paved streets and sidewalks, working traffic signals and traffic signs. The White Oak Bicycle Co-op is bringing "traffic gardens," which provide controlled learning environments for new bicycle riders, to Red Bank and Chattanooga.
"It’s a scaled-down street network where children and new riders can practice biking and road safety in a car-free space," Red Bank Parks and Recreation Manager Jeffrey Grabe told city commissioners at their work session last week.
Tennessee already has two traffic gardens: one northeast of Nashville at Gallatin Miracle Park and another in Knoxville known as Safety City . The latter is a more elaborate version of the concept, designed as a miniature city complete with a child-size Applebee’s, post office, football stadium and First Horizon Bank.
While traffic gardens can be as fancy as funding allows, some traffic gardens are simply streetscapes painted on asphalt, said Kat Volzer, the director of programming for the White Oak Bicycle Co-op, a volunteer-led, nonprofit community bicycle organization.
Read more from our newspartners at the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
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