As part of my internship (which feels like an eon ago) with the City of Tacoma, I created a traffic calming primer targeted to the Hilltop community. Using my background in active transportation, as many local examples as possible, and drawings that came from youth outreach at McCarver elementary, the book covers almost all of the standard tools that traffic engineers use to keep traffic at residential speeds as they move through the neighborhood. The charrettes involved children from the elementary school and focused on their neighborhood and what they would like to see for it in the future. Many of the responses focused on feeling safe and being able to play with other in the neighborhood, something that is directly related to safe neighborhood streets and the extra autonomy that they provide local children.
During the charrette, the children drew pictures of their neighborhood and many of these included the traffic calming treatments that you see in the professional guides used in the active transportation planning community, such as the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide and the AASHTO Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities (currently on the 4th edition, but you can see an older version here). As soon as I saw these pictures, I knew that I had to create something that highlighted these illustrations. If I had had access to InDesign at the time, the booklet would have been even better. Everything was done in Microsoft Word. Layout, design, text, and some photos are my work.The PDF version is on the city website here.
