Seattle Builds Bicycle Traffic Garden

A few miles outside of Seattle, the Cascade Bicycle Club has built something completely new to the US. Their traffic garden is, "A place that mimics real-life street conditions and that’s out of harm’s way," says Jonathan Maus of Bike Portland.

The garden is a lot more than a few cones and some chalk, they've made a kind of mini-city. "The project replaced two unused tennis courts and turned them into a smartly designed streetscape complete with crosswalks, multi-lane roads, a roundabout, and more. The idea was to create a place where kids and adults can practice safe riding skills in a realistic environment away from the dangers posed by other road users." The garden's designer, Steve Durrant, says he, "tried to include many different traffic scenarios in the space: stop lines, crosswalks, lane merging, a roundabout, a one-way loop, and so on."

While such places are common in Europe, the piece reports that this is the first of these gardens in the US.