April 1, 2017
For Immediate Release:
Children’s Book Teaches Kids About Safe Street Designs, Practices
How I Get To School: A Complete Streets Story makes road design manuals accessible to our most precious travelers.
Toole Design Group (TDG), the nation’s leading planning, engineering and landscape architecture firm specializing in multimodal transportation, has released the first in their “Kid’s Eye View” series of children’s books focused on safe street design. “How I Get To School: A Complete Streets Story” gives a child’s view of how streets can be built for all forms of transportation, and provide safe, efficient mobility for all users.
“As we learn more about the importance of multimodal street design, it is imperative that we educate our future leaders, engineers, planners and stakeholders on what the future of streets can look like,” said Andy Clarke, Director of Strategy at TDG. “By showing the possibilities to our young people and their parents with clear, simple storytelling, we can help kids understand the importance of Complete Streets.”
Filled with colorful technical images of complete street designs for people walking, biking, taking transit, and driving, “How I Get To School!” invites readers to accompany a friend and her parent on their way to school.
For parents and transportation professionals who wish to learn more about the concepts shown in the book, “Bikey”, the helpful blue bird, chirps the page number for each design, taken from the MassDOT Separated Bike Lane Planning & Design Guide.
“How I Get To School: A Complete Streets Story” is available in PDF format as a free download here.
Future “Kid’s Eye View” releases from TDG may include the “AASHTO Policy Coloring Book on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets” and “Looking for a Sign: The MUTCD and Me”
For More Information:
Although TDG’s “Kids Eye View” book series is a bit of fun for April Fool’s Day, the idea was inspired by a real-life story told to us by Byron Rushing, of the Atlanta Regional Commission, an APBP Board Member. One of his young children apparently did pick up a copy of the MassDOT Separated Bike Lane Planning & Design Guide and made up their own story to go along with the graphics. What makes the idea of a kid’s eye view book series believable is that we could really use resources such as this to inspire future generations of engineers, urban designers, and planners to think about active transportation as fundamental!
