“Today I’m announcing a major effort called ‘The All Ages Project.’ In collaboration with the City Council and the New York Academy of Medicine, this project will completely re-envision what it means to grow old in New York Next month, we will begin to address that challenge with traffic engineering improvements at high-accident areas which are especially problematic for seniors.”

— Mayor Bloomberg, State of the City address, January 17, 2008

When Transportation Alternatives (T.A.) launched the nation’s first Safe Routes for Seniors campaign in 2003, getting City buy-in was a big priority. Having worked intersection by intersection for nearly five years, the Mayor’s announcement this January offered our program the potential to win street safety improvements on a citywide scale.

Safe Routes for Seniors owes its beginning to the nation’s first Safe Routes to School program, which T.A. launched at five schools in the Bronx back in 1997. As T.A. staff and our Bronx Committee galvanized parents and neighborhoods around schools to improve street safety for children, we repeatedly heard appeals from another vulnerable pedestrian group: senior citizens.

In response to these calls for safe streets, T.A. launched Safe Routes for Seniors. Backed by a five-year, $500,000 grant from the New York State Department of Health’s Healthy Heart program, the campaign challenged government to rethink the impact of streets on the vulnerable pedestrians and has raised the standards for universal design on New York City streets. The grant and government support wasn’t just a milestone for T.A.; it marked one of the first times that a major health organization made explicit links between street design and public health.

The program’s first target was Washington Heights, where the Washington Heights & Inwood Council for the Aging (WHICOA) and the seniors of the Arc Fort Washington Senior Center and Fort Washington Houses joined with T.A. at workshops and walkthroughs to redesign streets around senior centers and senior-rich housing tracts. Our working group quickly won the endorsement of all the local elected officials as well as a new curb-cut ramp, pedestrian signal and new street markings to keep cars stopped at the red light further from the crosswalk.

Word of the project quickly spread. Seniors in Inwood, Harlem, Chinatown, the Upper East Side, Chelsea and most recently the Upper West Side and Bay Ridge called out to T.A. for similar improvements. And a growing list of influential New York voices have joined the campaign; State Senator Liz Krueger, Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal, Penn South, Community Board 11, Harlem Hospital, AAARI, Council Senior Center, Lincoln Square NORC Advisory Council, the Coalition for a Livable West Side, Harlem River Park Task Force and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have all come on board.

As Safe Routes for Seniors matured, its philosophy evolved. In the beginning the focus was improving intersections for seniors. New research, including the T.A. study Discriminatory by Design, have shown the need for broader measures to impact seniors’ walking habits and design safer streets. T.A. revised its approach by working with seniors in Harlem and Inwood to redesign entire corridors that connected them to key destinations in their community. On the Upper West Side and in Chinatown and Chelsea, we worked with our partners to define senior-dense zones, or “Elder Districts,” in their neighborhoods where multiple streets and intersections would be redesigned specifically for seniors. Most New York City streets are designed for cars; cars get the most space and the most prioritized movement. The Safe Routes for Seniors campaign changes this approach so senior citizens become the “design vehicle” and moving people the primary purpose of the street. Streets designed for senior citizens accommodate their slower walking speeds and potential vision and mobility impairments and provide a higher standard of protection for pedestrians.

Now in its fifth year, the campaign has succeeded making this major, largely unaddressed quality of life issue for senior citizens a priority for the Mayor, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. It has also raised senior citizens’ expectations about their streets and empowered them to demand safer walking conditions. New York City and the nation are coming to see that ensuring the health of the fastest-growing age group means taking the walking environment seriously. The Mayor’s announcement is an unprecedented endorsement of these principles, and a step closer to senior-friendly streets.