Los Ranchitos Quick Build

Living Streets Alliance has been working with Los Amigos Elementary since 2015 to bring Safe Routes to School programs to the school, like a Walking School Bus, build-a-bike classes, and in-school walking and biking safety curriculum. Through our partnership it became increasingly apparent that families here face barriers to walking and biking, including issues related to the built environment. Even so, it is clear that kids and families here love to walk and bike! Each weekly Walking School Bus brings out 100 to 200 students, and over a dozen supportive parents and teachers to facilitate safe road crossings. Students arrive at school with a running start, awake and ready for the day, having already gotten some good exercise and positive interactions with a community of caring adults.

Since 2015 LSA has worked to better understand the unique context and needs of the neighborhood and its residents. We worked with Toole Design to create a “Travel Plan” report to assess specific challenges and create recommendations. We conducted community engagement events where neighbors could pinpoint areas of greatest concern and name what changes they’d like to see. We did a series of observation studies and showed up with devices to gather speed data from vehicles travelling down the neighborhood streets, and worked with Pima County to bring their tube counters to collect hard data.

Mossman Avenue was identified as a street of particular concern; parents and neighbors named it as a street with a troubling amount of speeding, and the data confirmed this. Many kids and their families walk a mile and a half to school from their homes here, wishing that cars would slow down and respect the safety and needs of all modes of travel. We worked with an engineering firm, Psomas, to assess options and feasibility to create more safety for kids and families walking to school, and given the particulars of this street, the ideal treatment was to install six chicanes - using 3D elements to create a serpentine curve that forces drivers to slow down. The method and materials of installation is called “LQC” - Lighter, Quicker, and Cheaper, using temporary elements like plastic flexposts and visually striking paint colors that can be a temporary intervention and is simpler and requires fewer hoops than a permanent concrete installation. We partnered with the art teacher at Los Amigos Elementary to have her students create artwork that would appear within the chicane areas to make the street more colorful, beautiful, noticeable, and adding more contributions from youth in the neighborhood.