Students for safer streets: Learning from the new generation of activists

Photo: Jared Korb

If there is one thing we have learned in our work, it’s that the people who use city spaces are the experts on how those spaces succeed or fail them.

In the fall of 2020, Chloe Carlson saw that the street outside her middle school in New Westminster, British Columbia wasn’t working. “Cars don’t yield to us while we are riding our bikes,” she said. “We end up having to pull over because we feel unsafe.” Chloe requested traffic calming to help make the street work better for everyone. The City listened, and so did we.

To come up with a solution, we worked with Glenbrook Middle School students to design new bump-outs—curb extensions that reduce the amount of street space people share with cars and encourage vehicle drivers to slow down—outside the school. With support from the City of New Westminster and Spin, a leading micromobility company, Chloe’s ideas came to life: In August 2021, Glenbrook students and team Happy Cities worked together to paint the curb bump-outs on the street in vibrant colours—just in time for back to school.

Photos: Jared Korb

These kinds of interventions don’t just improve safety: they give participants a deeper sense of ownership and belonging over the spaces they use every day.

“I’m going to bring my kids back here in 20 years and show them how we made our street safer!”

— GLENBROOK MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT, NEW WESTMINSTER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

To learn more about this project, read the full blog post from Spin, or watch the video below.