Keeping Kids Safe One Cone at a Time
In the battle for street safety, crossing guards are on the front lines.
Tasked with ensuring that hundreds of children make it from one sidewalk to another unscathed every day, they experience our streets, their users, and those users' habits more intimately than any engineer, officer or elected official ever could. The verdict: The streets, even the ones hugging our schools, are unsafe.
Despite being sheathed in reflective gear and stationed in what should be the safest part of the street, Streetsblog reported that as many as 73 crossing guards were struck between 2012 and 2022 in New York City. “One was hit so hard she flew out of her shoes,” the publication wrote, quoting police reports obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. “One landed on her head after being slammed into the air, two were thrown onto car hoods and at least five were run over.”
It’s not just New York City. Almost a dozen crossing guards have died while on duty in Arkansas, Florida, Texas and California in the last two years. Schools all over the country have issued PSAs warning parents that pickup and drop-off are officially the most dangerous part of a student’s day.
One crossing guard in Denver decided to do something about it.
“My first day on the job I was like, ‘Wow, I cannot keep [drivers] out of the intersections,'” Nicole McSpirit told me. So, on the second day, she planted cones.
McSpirit started with a handful of cones, but she’s collected more over the years, which lets her make the street even safer.
McSpirit has been a crossing guard for three years now, though it’s not a role she thought she’d occupy. “When my kids were little, they went to this school, and I remember walking over with them and seeing [the former crossing guard] just kind of racing around, trying to, you know, to tackle this, this really kind of busy intersection,” she told me. “And I tried to help her every once in a while because there's only so much one person can do.”
When that guard retired, nobody stepped in. For several years, Park Hill Elementary was without a crossing guard until a friend of McSpirit suggested that she should consider filling in. “You know, I could,” McSpirit recalled thinking. The more she thought about it, the more obvious it became that she should do it “for the community, really.”
On her first day on the job, she was reminded of her predecessor’s struggles. Speeds were excessive and drivers were stopping in the crosswalk incessantly. “It’ll only be a minute!” was the excuse. McSpirit knows that it doesn’t even take a minute to have your life upended. “And when cars can't see children and children can't see cars, bad things happen,” she said. “So literally, after day one, I was like, okay, I need to do something.”
She had some traffic cones left over from a prior project, so she repurposed that handful to block off the intersections during her shifts. Technically, McSpirit was daylighting, or maximizing the visibility of people and vehicles within a certain perimeter of the intersection. In fact, through her cone placement, she was effectively enforcing Denver’s existing laws: It’s illegal to park within 20 feet of an intersection. Most drivers who violate this law may not be doing so knowingly, considering that, without any visual cues, it’s anyone’s guess what 20 feet looks and feels like.
Hoboken, New Jersey has a similar law regarding parking near intersections. However, in recent years, the city has systematically daylit the city with paint, flexposts and, in some cases, rain gardens. This helps maintain sightlines for both motorists and pedestrians, reducing the likelihood of crashes.
The handful of cones was a helpful start, but it quickly became apparent that they wouldn’t suffice. Luckily, friends and supporters pitched in. The school was on board too, and the city had no grounds to disagree. Today, McSpirit has 43 cones hugging the school’s perimeter. She even went beyond modest daylighting and installed cones in such a way that traffic would slow down as it approached the intersection. It worked. It worked immediately.
Before:
After:
In fact, her motley crew of cones was more effective than the several-thousand-dollar flashing signage that gets first dibs in school zones. Those signs, while helpful in alerting drivers to slow down, don’t actually compel drivers to change their behavior, at least in isolation. In concert with other design features — speed bumps, curb extensions, chicanes and so on — they are more likely to work, but at that point, McSpirit notes, signs might not even be needed. “They also might give you a false sense of security that somebody is going to stop,” she noted from experience. “If they’re going 40 mph down the street, they probably won’t see those little flashing lights or, more importantly, you.”
McSpirit’s many, many traffic cones.
When I spoke to McSpirit, Denver was gray, wintry and downright gloomy. Even so, she counted 53 bikes and scooters parked around the school. It was Wednesday, or bike bus day, when a segment of the student body commutes to school on two wheels, instead of in the backseat of mom’s minivan.
She saw fewer kids than usual, which she attributed to the weather, but there were still enough to remind her that Denver is changing. The way people want to get around is changing. And consequently, the way people see the built environment is changing. The bike bus, still in its infancy, is so popular that the school is scrambling to figure out bike parking.
“You know, I've been lucky that the school has been incredibly supportive of everything I've done,” McSpirit reiterated. If Park Hill Elementary serves as a testing ground and a precedent for other schools in the city, then so be it. Though, she wishes safety weren’t up to one crossing guard’s tenacity and ingenuity. “This is not something that gets taught to crossing guards,” she laments. “Right now we're literally just saying, ‘here's the drop-off time and the pickup time. Figure it out from there!’”
McSpirit is stationed on a neighborhood street. Not every crossing guard and school is so lucky in their location. Many are left to fend for themselves on some of the city’s most dangerous roads, roads that could benefit more from McSpirit’s low-cost tactical approach than another flashing sign. Then there are the schools without crossing guards. They might actually be the strongest candidate for cones.
“I think it’s kind of funny that crossing guards are needed at all. We are needed, but we shouldn’t be needed,” she told me. “That's the ultimate goal, right? To not have someone [making you] stop for this child walking, but to have a safe way for that child to walk across where they're visible and for [drivers] to slow down [by design]. So yeah, that's what I'd like to see happen.”
Until then, McSpirit will continue keeping kids safe, one cone at a time.
Do you want expert guidance in making your streets safer? Registration for the Accelerator winter session is open now. Attendees will get personalized coaching from Strong Towns experts with insights from the book “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town.”
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Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.