Royal Award for Street Design Guide

23 November 2021

Designing Streets for Kids is NACTO-GDCI's latest guide to designing urban streets has won a Prince Michael International Road Safety Award.

This supplement to the Global Street Design Guide builds upon the approach of putting people first, with a focus on the specific needs of children and their caregivers as pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users in streets around the world. The guide includes recommendations and global case studies to help cities implement streets that are safe and healthy, comfortable and convenient, and inspirational and educational—streets that better serve everyone.

Designing Streets for Kids aims to inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities—including children—to know what’s possible for their urban streets. The guide offers tools, strategies, street design examples, and case studies from around the world for readers to adapt to their local contexts, and it seeks to help readers envision, plan, design, build, program, and maintain streets that prioritize children and their caregivers. The guide shows how to create safe childrenfriendly streets at different scales, from details about landscaping and sidewalk benches to transportation planning at the city and regional level. It also provides targeted street redesign strategies to make streets safer and more efficient for moving people, not just vehicles. It pays special attention to child-friendly street redesigns in key places, such as schools and neighborhood streets, and high-traffic areas, including commercial streets and intersections.

Designing Streets for Kids was produced as a component of NACTO-GDCI’s Streets for Kids program, which is funded by Bernard Van Leer Foundation, FIA Foundation, Fondation Botnar, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. NACTO-GDCI is currently supporting cities in implementing lessons from the guide, helping to ensure the successful translation from paper to practice. The team is also providing technical assistance and virtual training workshops in 12 cities, with future expansion plans in the works. The $1.7M dollar program spans across 3 years but has been extended into a fourth year as a result of the global pandemic.