TURNERS FALLS — Don’t expect any flora at the new garden that is in the works behind Sheffield Elementary School.
That’s because the new addition, set to be next to the playground and the American flag, is not a typical garden; it is a traffic garden.
Traffic gardens are “scaled-down street networks designed for children and new riders to practice biking and road safety in a car-free environment,” according to trafficgardens.com, the website of Discover Traffic Gardens, a company that aims to educate and help facilitate the creation of new traffic gardens around the world. According to the same website, traffic gardens have been around since 1937, when a police officer in Mansfield, Ohio, developed a “safety town” in a local park with the same goal as modern-day traffic gardens.
The new traffic garden at Sheffield Elementary School, which is expected to be ready for the start of the 2025-2026 school year, is the result of a partnership between the school and the Franklin Regional Council of Governments’ (FRCOG) transportation planning staff. FRCOG’s staff members are in talks with other regional schools and are on the lookout for other interested communities across Franklin County.
FRCOG’s transportation planning staff members have had traffic gardens in the back of their minds since attending a conference about innovations in transportation several years ago. They were also inspired by the Northampton Safety Village at Arcanum Field.
“We wanted to bring it to Franklin County,” said Audrey Boraski, land use and transportation planner at FRCOG, “because we’ve been working on age-friendly transportation for the last three years here.”
Pedestrian deaths caused by vehicles have increased over time, hitting a 41-year high in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heightening FRCOG’s desire to implement traffic gardens.
“If we could bring something like this to our communities to educate people, at any age, but especially young kids, [on] the rules of the road,” Boraski said, it could increase “confidence and safety in a controlled setting that might get more kids outside moving.”
FRCOG ordered traffic garden stencils from StencilFast, a stencil manufacturing firm based in Virginia. The stencils, which were designed in partnership with Discover Traffic Gardens, include handicap parking signs and bike lane markings, scaled-down but still life-size.
“If more towns are like, ‘We need this,’ or, ‘We want this,’ they can borrow our stencils,” Boraski noted. “[They can] come up with a design and then ideally have us or some sort of transportation engineer approve the design to make sure it matches the rules of the road.”
The ways in which a traffic garden can be customized are numerous, Boraski emphasized.
“You can be so creative, and you can scale-up and scale-down,” she said.
Heath Cummings, facilities manager with the Gill-Montague Regional School District, said he was excited about the idea of implementing a traffic garden when FRCOG reached out this past spring.
“FRCOG approached me and asked if there was somewhere that we might be interested in having [a traffic garden] on the property,” he said. “I said, ‘Absolutely.’ This would be great.”
According to Cummings, the hope is that the paint for the traffic garden is dry come the first day of school. In preparation for that, some repairs are being made to the pavement that the traffic garden will be painted on. Cummings already had the spot in mind, behind the school in the recess area, because it is gated off from traffic during school hours.
“It’s one of the safest spots on the property we could find,” he said.
“We’re always looking for ways to improve how the schools look,” Cummings continued. “And add to the educational and safety aspects of the entire district. And this was a really cool project that added to both of those.”