Nashville’s Youth Designing Its Streets
By Uma Peters, Oliver Beaulieu, and Remonda Mahrous, Nashville Youth Design Team Interns
Other contributions from the NYDT Advocacy Committee
3 min read This blog gives an overview of the actions of the Nashville Youth Design Team’s project concerning the safety of the most deadly portion of Dickerson Pike in Nashville. It also announces their new project proposal for a Dickerson Pike crossing in front of Rocketship Elementary.
NYDT Interns pose on their tactical urbanism traffic island during installation
The Nashville Youth Design Team (NYDT) is a diverse group of high school students from around Nashville who are interested in making the city a better place. Through organization and direct action, the team has been hard at work implementing their design interventions.
Reflecting on Our First Design Installation
The Nashville Youth Design Team recently installed a glow-in-the-dark crosswalk at the intersection of Dickerson Pike and Hart Lane, to improve pedestrian safety in Nashville. This intersection is one of the most dangerous intersections in Nashville. There have been over 20 incidents involving pedestrians at this intersection reported in the last 3 years. The neighborhood around Dickerson Pike lacks ways for pedestrians to safely get around, and there are very few sidewalks in the area. Many residents don’t have any other options other than to walk. Ramona Gholston, who is a resident of the area and attended a community walk with NYDT, says that she does not feel comfortable walking around here. There are a few schools in the area as well that have trouble with keeping their students safe. For students who have to walk from school to get home, it becomes very dangerous. The Design Team hopes to work with some of these schools to help make their students safer.
Remonda edits the presentation for the Community Resources group
The Community Resources group consisted of Remonda, Nada, and Joseph. As a team, the group was researching ideas that related to fixing community-wide issues that benefited everyone. While the group was researching issues and solutions they came across a pedestrian safety issue in Nashville and they discovered that Dickerson Pike and Hart Lane had the highest pedestrian death count. Once they discovered that fact, they were immediately fascinated. The group began talking to adult facilitators from the Civic Design Center about this huge problem. A cause of this pedestrian death rate seemed to be the lack of visibility at night for cars and pedestrians. When they realized that, it immediately clicked; they needed something that glows in the dark. From there they started putting together a draft of the design and a PowerPoint. After the design day exhibition, attendees voted on their project of choice from all the groups and NYDT received confirmation that the community resources group won. The entire NYDT began to discuss more formal ways of implementing this tactical urbanism design. Then they began to figure out how we could get the state/city involved in order to get approval.
Nada and Remonda discuss ideas for their presentation
We invited staff from Walk Bike Nashville to attend our Youth Design Exhibition where they learned about the Community Resources Group’s idea for a crosswalk at Dickerson and Hart Lane. Since then, we’ve been collaborating with Walk Bike Nashville to make the 1.7 make segment of Dickerson Pike from Trinity Lane to Ewing Drive a safer place for pedestrians. This collaboration between Walk Bike Nashville and the Civic Design Center was made possible with a grant from the Tennessee Department of Health.
In October, we met with both groups to form a steering committee. We made plans for how we would install and measure the impact of traffic calming measures at Dickerson and Hart Lane. We came up with a community engagement process to understand where those who live and work along this segment of Dickerson Pike need to go, where they need to cross the street, and what barriers they currently face to feeling safe. We sent outreach surveys to community members to learn about their experiences. We used the feedback from those most likely to walk on the corridor, with a focus on transit riders.
On Sunday, October 24, 2021, we met at the installation site and got to work! We started with a semi-permanent layer of green paint on the traffic island. We surrounded that area with bollards, then used temporary chalk paint to add an eye-catching design to our installation. We returned to the site that evening to add the light-up beach balls and lead a community walk audit of the site with steering committee members, neighbors, business owners, and news reporters. During the walk, participants filled out a bingo card we made, so they could track what they saw and felt while walking along the side of Dickerson Pike on their way to see our installation. At the site, we explained our vision of the installation to participants and engaged them in conversations about long-term changes they would like to see to the Pike.
NYDT interns paint permanent green road paint on Dickerson Pike on an early morning in October
We are excited about the progress we’ve made so far and the work we have planned for Dickerson Pike. Our next steps include administering our survey to students at local schools to learn about their experiences with public and active transit along Dickerson Pike. We are also continuing to measure the impact of our installation on Dickerson and Hart Lane, through conducting speed measurements at the site. We hope that by installing the traffic island we are able to slow cars down at this busy, dangerous intersection and we are able to make it a safer place for all members of the community.
Our Next Project Proposal on Dickerson Pike
To continue our impact along Dickerson Pike, we decided to focus our efforts directly in front of a school, Rocketship Elementary, to increase road safety for kids. We hope to use a tactical urbanism installation to inspire permanent changes to another dangerous crossing area. We are still in the process of finalizing our design and gaining public support.
PROPOSAL:
A temporary pedestrian island in front of Rocketship Elementary
Freshening crosswalk paint up
GOALS:
Increase road safety for kids / nearby tenants by slowing down turning cars and providing a safe space in the road for crossing kids
Plan view of crosswalk idea for Rocketship Elementary
Section view of crosswalk idea with pedestrian island
In order to even put this project into place, we’ll need to communicate with several different people in order to gain support and aid for our project. We will first start with emailing the Rocketship Principal our design idea, as well as surveying student opinions on their experiences regarding this crosswalk. We would like to gain support from the Council Member Kyonztè Toombs of District 2 , and hopefully get feedback from the Dickerson Pike Steering Committee and surrounding communities on our design.
Our plan is to collect data and numbers to show if this design is a success. In order to do that we will record the amount of students, bus riders, and others who use the crosswalk before and after school, before the installation, and repeating that after the installation. We will also record the speed of the cars using a speed gun before and after the installation, to see if cars are slowing down after the crosswalk has been altered for safety.