The History of Traffic Gardens

The very first "safety town" was installed in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1937 by Patrol Officer Frend Boals, introducing the concept of traffic gardens to the United States. Inspired by the book Safety Town Stories, Boals created a miniature surface-painted streetscape within a new local park, complete with scaled-down roads, portable stop signs, working traffic signals, and small buildings. This innovative, child-sized learning environment quickly gained attention and recognition from federal transportation officials and the AAA and was written up in national articles.

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A similar idea had emerged a few years earlier in the UK, where portable road safety kits appeared in school playgrounds in the mid-1930s. Just months after Ohio’s Safety Town opened, Model Traffic Area No. 1 debuted in Tottenham, U.K. It wad a six-acre permanent installation with streets and working traffic signals, launched by the Minister for Transport and widely covered in the national press. Both U.S. and U.K. efforts aimed to tackle growing concerns about child safety by creating miniature street networks for hands-on learning. Although Tottenham’s site drew thousands of children initially, it soon closed due to World War II. Meanwhile, Ohio’s simpler painted model and related programs began spreading across Midwestern communities.
In 1964, the Ohio-based National Safety Town Center formalized safety town programs, supporting growth from 20 safety town programs to 700 by 1983. At its peak, the Center reported 3,500 programs worldwide. Some 1970s safety town installations and programs, like Portsmouth Safety Town and Eisenhower Park Safety Town remain fully active today.

In 2010, the idea of deploying scaled-down street networks reemerged as "traffic gardens," influenced by a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) report highlighting a Swiss example. This is the first federal use of the "traffic garden" concept and it inspired renewed interest and adoption among transportation professionals and bike-pedestrian advocates. Subsequently, a 2011 StreetFilms video featuring Utrecht’s traffic garden in the Netherlands became very popular with this new audience, helping to spread both the concept and the term more widely.

In the years that followed, traffic gardens started to take off nationwide, inspired most notably by Seattle’s White Center Traffic Garden installed in 2015. As the work of the National Safety Town Center slowed, new installations began to emerge aligned with biking groups and school cycling initiatives and under fresh names such as "traffic garden," "traffic playground," "bike garden," and others.

​Today’s traffic gardens often feature colorful line-striping and pavement markings, a shift from the miniature asphalt road networks of 1970s–’80s-era Safety Towns. In recent years, cities have developed installation guides, and professional-grade stencils have made setup more accessible (see our Resource page). School districts are increasingly adopting these spaces—Washington, D.C. has 12, Seattle has ten, and Milwaukee has one in each of its 85 elementary schools. There are now over 335 traffic gardens in North America and we have found more than 1,800 worldwide. Though designs and terminology have evolved, the core idea endures: creating safe, interactive miniature street networks for skill-building and safety education through play, practice, and lessons.