My mom is a civil engineer named Fionnuala Quinn, and she loves good road design. She loves smooth sidewalks, protected bike lanes, clear signage, sightlines, and safety as a concept. It’s a common misconception that she hates cars, but she doesn’t: she drives one herself. She just hates the idea that car drivers are the only road users who matter. When we pull up in her minivan to an ice cream shop, she grins and says, “This is one of my favorite parking lots.” I take a photo of the parking lot, because I want to understand what it is that she loves.
Growing up with a safety mom was, of course, wildly embarrassing. It was hard to discern where her principles about road caution ended and her anxiety about protecting me began. When I went rollerblading as a child, my body was fully enveloped in protective pads and reflective lighting. When I was a teenager, my mom ran down to the edge of our driveway, where my date was waiting to pick me up; she wanted to talk with him about a tricky intersection in our neighborhood. At the end of my driver’s education course in high school, parents attended a mandatory class with students, a PE teacher, and a police officer. I sat in the class, tense. I knew my mom would have something to say, and that nobody would leave the room unscathed. Although she knew from her own research that the state’s curriculum covered how a driver should behave around people on foot or bike, the instructor never brought it up, and neither did the officer. At the end of the session, my mom raised her hand and asked why we hadn’t heard anything about how to share the road with people who aren’t in cars: these are, after all, probably the most vulnerable road users a sixteen-year-old will encounter.
The officer shrugged. “We can’t cover everything,” he said. “We have to focus on the important stuff.”
“Are people on bikes not important?” she snapped at him, a question she repeated later, as I sat silently beside her in the car home.
This is how she always was. So I wasn’t surprised when we spent every Saturday of lockdown crouched on the sidewalk outside my parents’ house, cutting up yellow duct tape. My mom was using tape, stencils, and spray chalk to create a small-scale road system — a six-foot-wide pretend street on top of the actual street. On her knees, she carefully measured the tape to make an installation covering about twenty by forty feet. She set down stencils of road features that she had created especially for these projects — cutouts of stop intersections, pedestrian crossings, stop bars, yield word stencils, triangular “shark’s teeth” road markings that indicate which users must give way — and then sprayed them with aerosolized chalk. Sometimes the stencil wasn’t flat on the ground, and the design didn’t come out as crisp as she’d have liked. Over the week, the chalk smudged, sometimes melting away entirely after rainstorms. But each week, we’d begin again. For my mom, the pandemic’s quiet streets presented the perfect opportunity: she had worked on these kinds of installations, and now she had a chance to live alongside one.
These installations are called traffic gardens — or safety towns, safety villages, or traffic parks. They are small-scale worlds where children can practice using roadways and learn how they work. This matters because road use, as my mom says, isn’t intuitive. Of course you stop at a stop sign, but when there are multiple vehicles at an intersection, who goes first? When is it safe to bike across an intersection?
The duct-tape streets my mom made were large enough for a bicycle or scooter to navigate but too small for real cars; they just drove over them like they would a game of hopscotch. A 3D figure she placed on our lawn held a sign warning drivers to watch for children. She changed the layout of the tiny road system weekly: sometimes crafting double roundabouts to make a figure eight, other times laying down a duct-tape train track that bisects the chalk neighborhood.
The versions outside my parents’ house were entirely flat on asphalt, but my mom makes more elaborate iterations when she’s working with clients — schools, museums, or transportation initiatives like Open Streets. Sometimes she installs upright road signs or strings of pennon flags defining their borders. Sometimes she uses artificial grass to construct medians in miniature. My mom’s traffic gardens are usually installed in schools rather than neighborhoods, built in consultation with principals and parents and kids. In DC public schools, for example, where second graders learn to ride bikes in PE class, the school gym is poor preparation for the roads they’ll need to navigate in real life. The school traffic gardens are paired with curriculum, and are designed to mimic the traffic patterns and obstacles the students will face outside the gym, to help them learn how to move safely through the environment that poses the greatest risk of killing them.
On our street, the traffic garden was meant to be explored through play, and children understood instinctively that the fun-size neighborhood belonged to them. The kids navigated it effortlessly on their bikes and scooters. The parents just seemed happy that their kids had something to do outside after being cooped up for so long. Passing adults took pictures on their phones, and I took pictures of them taking pictures as I watched out the window from my bedroom. I sent the photos to my mom so that she’d know people were enjoying her work. Once, a family of geese miraculously looped through the little roundabouts. These whimsical miniature street systems are at the heart of what my mom thinks is vital and good. They are tiny utopias she is building — strange, if somewhat boring, microparadises. A traffic garden is a world where everyone obeys traffic laws. Nobody speeds, and children are raised to have observant, intuitive relationships with transportation.
Several years ago, my mom decided to become the country’s leading expert on traffic gardens. She built up her skills working as a civil engineer and, later on, as a consultant for a planning firm that specializes in bicycling and walking routes. She spent years raising her hand at public meetings, urging the school system to apply for road improvement funds and insisting that bus routes not be cut. Growing up, I watched my mom devote more and more time to her vision, but it wasn’t easy for me, her adolescent daughter, to share her excitement about following the rules. Once, a neighborhood friend told my mom that she’d seen my sister driving very cautiously, and at dinner, my mom announced that this was the best compliment she could possibly have heard about a child.
Although it was easy for me to make fun of my mom, to dismiss her interests as dull, to cringe in the passenger seat of my date’s car, I also appreciated the dangers she was fighting against. But I was less likely to agree with her while she was picking fights with county officials about intersections than I was to vehemently disagree with friends who complained about bicyclists or dismissed the inherent risks of driving. The stats were drilled into me: each year, vehicles claim around forty thousand lives nationally. About forty thousand people die, which means some forty thousand families experience terrible loss. It also means that about forty thousand people kill someone with their car and then have to find a way to move forward. About forty thousand times a year, people surrounding a scene witness an unexpected death. My mom was once one of them, when she saw a car carrying two women crash as the pair drove home from choir practice. Many thousands more people are injured by cars — sometimes in ways that are only painful and scary, other times in ways that are life-altering.
These numbers paralyzed me. When I thought about driving daily over the course of a lifetime, a crash seemed inevitable. I was naturally clumsy and inattentive, and feared how these tendencies would affect my driving. I hated the unforgiving nature of speed, how quickly I had to make decisions. This stew of panic and insecurity and road-safety facts coalesced into impassioned speeches that I delivered to my friends as if they’d asked me to give a TED Talk about why my aversion to driving was justified, why I wasn’t pathetic. When you multiply that forty thousand by ten years, you get four hundred thousand deaths, and then multiply that by every person who feels this loss, I’d tell them. Multiply it by twenty years, thirty years, fifty years. I wanted everyone to see that my fear was appropriate — that actually, they were unreasonable for driving down the highway with anything but mortal terror.
For years, I went to extreme lengths to avoid driving. My refusal to drive dictated where I lived, what jobs I held, who I dated. This was the latest humiliation my mom had given me: the humiliation of being an adult woman with a purely ornamental driver’s license, a license I’d obtained without her and was too afraid to use. I rode my bike instead, which left my own body exposed but made it harder to hurt anyone else. I was always weighing my fear of being killed against my fear of killing. And I always knew who to blame.
My mom, who grew up in Ireland, had limited compassion for my plight. In Ireland, she explained, children were expected to get themselves around. She started riding Dublin’s public bus alone when she was four; it was how she returned from school. When she was eleven, the bus drivers went on strike, and everyone started biking instead.
In much of the suburban United States, by contrast, children are essentially treated as passive cargo that adults move around. They get on a school bus that leads them to one particular place; they get in the back of a car and are ferried from one place to another. For the most part, we don’t actively interact with transportation until we reach the magic age of sixteen, when we’re supposed to learn how to operate a two-ton vehicle and navigate the road within a period of months. My mom tried to disrupt this dynamic. “Do you remember how when you were kids I used to make you direct me home from places?” she asked me. “I wanted you to understand directions on your own, to compensate for your lack of transportation independence.” I vaguely remember this, but I’m not sure it paid off. My sense of direction is in the low-to-average range.
It irks my mom when she hears people talk about the dangers of the US transportation system as if they’re universal. When Vision Zero, a movement that aims to eliminate road deaths, collected data about its twenty-six participating countries, it found that the safest ones had death rates of around 28 per population million. The United States had the highest, at 104. Ireland’s rate was 31. When my mom moved here, her chances of being killed by a car, or hitting someone with a car, or losing someone she loves or the way she lives to a car, changed dramatically, multiplying within the span of a transatlantic flight. The most recent Vision Zero data puts the risks in the US at triple those in Ireland. And it’s only getting worse: US road deaths increased in 2020, then jumped by another 18.5 percent in the first half of 2021, the sharpest six-month spike in traffic fatalities on record.
Risk rises and falls depending on which US city you live in, and then which neighborhood within that city — how well-serviced that population is and whether the local government prioritizes them. In data on motor-vehicle-related deaths, higher-income groups fare significantly better. One study estimated that — for what researchers suspected were a variety of infrastructural, social, and access-related reasons — people who completed college were two and a half times less likely to die on the road than people who hadn’t completed high school.
It’s daunting to take on these giant societal forces when the factors that make driving so deadly are so entrenched and when road safety strikes so many as dull. How, then, can my mom wedge herself between a country and its cars? How can she even know where to begin?
I think of stories my mom used to tell me about her time as the only woman engineer in an old job, where the men she worked with were all white and in their thirties and had never pushed a double-stroller or used a mobility aid, and so had never thought about the turning radius a sidewalk needs to accommodate these things. My mom’s point in telling these stories wasn’t that her presence as a woman offered a solution to road deaths, but that roads are used by everyone, and demand input from people with all kinds of experiences. In my mom’s utopia, everyone would talk about what they want out of our infrastructure, and everyone would feel that it was their right to ask for it. In her utopia, there would be a responsive local government that would take these requests seriously. Everybody would know the road belongs to everyone.
When I was twenty-two, I was hit by a car. I was almost across a pedestrian crosswalk with a walk signal when the car ran into the side of my hip and knocked me backward. I hit my head on the street and ended up concussed and bloody, with seven staples in my scalp and sprawling bruises across my legs and side. I was sore and whiplashed and as scared as ever of motor vehicles, but I was also what’s called so lucky.
My mom examined the intersection on Google Maps, and together we returned to the spot. I retread my path for her and stopped at the point where I fell, reenacting the scene until it thinned into a spatial riddle. My mom put her hand on her hip and walked to each side of the crosswalk to examine it from every angle. She presented her diagnosis: I was alive as a result of a small turning radius that slowed the driver. It was good intersection design, by my old college campus. When I graduated from there with a bachelor’s degree, I became two-and-a-half times less likely to die on the road. There’s luck, but there’s also design. On one level, the design that softened the impact that night was made out of wide crosswalks and narrow turns. In a larger sense, the design that protected me was made from the social and political forces that shuttled me from one safely designed neighborhood to another. The crash was deemed the fault of the driver, who, as she made a turn on her twenty-first birthday, looked the opposite way for oncoming cars rather than for pedestrians. I saw the advancing headlights from behind me only long enough to think, Oh my god. Still, I felt a sense of guilt. I was afraid that I let my mom down, that she had devoted her life to this work, and not even that had kept me safe.
After the crash, a lot of people asked if I had been riding my bike. The driver’s insurance company asked what color sweater I had been wearing, as if there were a color that would have made it okay to hit me. They asked if it had been raining. They initially offered zero dollars and zero cents for medical bills, and they sent a letter that essentially translated to: You really shouldn’t walk in front of moving cars, dummy.
I pushed back, but only because I went out for coffee with a friend from high school whose dad was a personal injury lawyer, and he said he’d take my case pro bono, and because my mom was a traffic safety expert — which is to say, because I had people in my life who told me that I could, and should, and was maybe even morally obligated to. In court, the driver wore black jeans and Keds, details I remember because I kept my eyes lowered, unable to make eye contact. I’d dreamed of her often. The judge ruled in my favor.
Any time I called it the accident, my mom bristled. The word “accident” removes accountability, she’d say. It makes it sound like it was something that randomly happened. After years of dismissing my mom’s speeches, I started to notice something she’d often mentioned — how people search for a reason to side with the car. Sometimes I sided with the car, too. I wanted to tell her that she could only see my crash through the lens she’d spent years constructing, a lens that blinded her to the simpler fact that her daughter was bad at using the road.
When my mom and I built the traffic gardens together, I wasn’t very good at it. We cut duct tape into many short pieces so we could stitch them into a rounded shape, but my strips of tape were usually too long. The miniature cul-de-sac looked jagged, almost pixelated. My mom asked me to draw a cartoon dragon in chalk on the installation’s perimeter, to add an element of fun. The creature came out fuzzy and unrecognizable, so I scrubbed it out with wet towels and asked my sister to come redo it. My mom was excited to have someone new on the team, and I took my sister’s arrival to mean that my shift had ended. My mom would be out there all day.
With my mom as their steward, traffic gardens have picked up some traction. She gets calls from physical education teachers around the country who have seen her work and want to replicate it. Sometimes they just wing it and try their own design; this means that many have significant flaws. In one, a roundabout ran in two directions. When my mom saw it, she couldn’t believe it. “The whole point of a roundabout,” she said, “is that you never stop.”
This was news to me: I always thought the point of roundabouts was to make driving a little more confusing and spicy. In reality, because roundabouts only go in one direction, they get to every angle by design. If drivers went in opposing directions, no one would ever be able to leave. We would go round in circles, unable to find a way out. At some point, we might stop believing there was one.
My mom worries that if you build an inaccurate roadway, children will be confused in the real world and create their own rules. The team that worked on the DC gardens wouldn’t put the traffic signs flat on the ground, even though they would have been easier to install that way. The designers wanted the children to learn to move their eyes up and to the right when they look for a sign.
When I last visited my parents, my mom showed me new safety kits that she had made for children in the neighborhood. The kids can use them to make even smaller road systems, on colorful paper, to design safe towns and build street networks that serve a variety of cartoon characters: some elderly, some children, some on bikes, some in cars, some in wheelchairs. She’s trying to figure out how to make traffic gardens a viable business, but this part is free. She glued a photo of each child to the paper-doll avatars they would use to move across the paper road.
It will take years before we know if the children she teaches become safe, confident, knowledgeable road users. If they grow up to be considerate of those they share the street with, if they attend their own town meetings, raise their hands, and advocate for bus routes. If they end up less likely to be injured or killed in a crash. If they end up less likely to hit someone themselves, less likely to only look right for cars, less likely to bump people on bikes for fun. If they help create a version of this country that makes sense to my mom.
Maybe the safety kits will slide into some box in their memory that they rarely access, becoming a surreal image they try to explain to a boyfriend in college, swearing it existed, unable to locate it online. Then again, children in DC have learned how to bicycle in a miniature universe my mom created, and if the axioms are true, they will never forget it. Maybe they’ll remember everything they need to know but forget where they learned it — forget the stickers she peeled and placed, forget the yellow duct tape we woke early each Saturday to measure, forget the chalk flowers, forget it all — like I did. I remember my mom cleaning out milk gallons for a craft when I was little, though I have no idea what we made.
But my mom remembers. The first traffic garden she ever visited was in Clontarf, Ireland, on a school trip when she was nine. She held on to that memory for years, even after further research revealed that the practice originated in the United States. Like a devoted boy-band fan, she visited the site of the original traffic garden in Mansfield, Ohio, which was created in 1937 after the death of a five-year-old child. It had been paved over many years ago. The lot was unmarked.
For the first time in my life, I have my own car — a Ford Focus from 2008, the year I asked my mom for a ride to the mall and she pointed me to the website for our county’s public bus system. I bought it when I turned twenty-six and moved to a small student town in the Midwest, a thousand miles from my parents’ home. I haven’t been in any accidents, although I’ve run my bumper into the curb and scraped my door against garage frames. I now love driving through the prairie, with its huge sky and empty roads. When I’m done with school, I want to move somewhere where I don’t need a car. But first, I might drive it across the country to see my mom — to find her in her home office again, spinning her worries into educational activities and methodical solutions.
The last time I visited, my mom sat gluing illustrations of wheelchairs to cardboard for a model craft, as she’d done a thousand times before.
“You know the whole point is for people not to die, right?” she said, using an X-Acto knife to trace a yield stencil. “So we’re playing a very long game where we have to believe it works. I think it’s going to work.”