Video by Jessica Leibowitz

Twenty-three third graders were seated in a classroom lined with traffic signs and the occasional working traffic signal. They were only mildly fidgety. The room took up a third of a squat green building in an obscure corner of a Brookhaven, Long Island park called the Wildlife Ecology Center, home also to a zoo, greenhouses, pools, and exercise trails. In the classroom, the subject was road safety, and two teachers in bright green T-shirts were running through slides and exercises. The class was a prelude to the real attraction for the kids: a miniature town outside, complete with car lanes and bike lanes, stop lights and walk signals, and a working railroad crossing—well, working except for the lack of a miniature train.

Reminiscing with the girl I work with on how the best part of growing up on LI is your elementary school trip to Safety Town 🚕🚲 — Alli Multer (@allimulter) June 12, 2015

The detailed course, and accompanying miniature cars and kid-sized bikes, is the centerpiece of Brookhaven's Safety Town program, a local iteration of a concept dating to the mid-20th century that has spawned unaffiliated Safety Towns in back lots around the world. In the class we sat in on last month in Brookhaven, teachers drilled in sayings like, "look four ways, always"—the four ways being over your shoulder to the left, to the left, to the right, and over your shoulder to the right—and drove home warnings about distracted driving with PowerPoint slides showing scary dashboard-perspective photos of young car passengers realizing death is imminent as the oblivious driver talks on the phone, eats, and reads over the steering wheel.

A girl shot her hand up in the middle of this. She asked if it was all right that her mom talked on Bluetooth in the car "almost all the time."

Two parent chaperones sitting in the back of the class exchanged looks.

Teacher Veronica Ramaci said, gently, "It's a safer option, but hands-free calling—they now do studies, and it distracts her brain, if you're on the phone, even if it's Bluetooth."

During the next segment, on crossing the street, a boy with a helmet of gelled hair raised his hand.

"Sometimes my mom is putting up her hair in a ponytail and she drives with her knees," he said. "Is that okay?"

One of the chaperones laughed.

"Really?" teacher Karen Harper said gently, "Well, you can share what we talked about today."

Later, in a down moment, one of the chaperones said to Gothamist, "I told my daughter, she better not say anything about my driving or I'll strangle her." A boy, unrelated to the chaperone, shared that he had driven a real car before.

New York City's Department of Transportation is home to two similar courses, called Safety City, in Washington Heights and Throgs Neck. The facilities have the miniature street courses, but not the nifty go karts. In 2007, the street safety advocacy site Streetsblog paid the uptown site a visit and found much to criticize in the curriculum, specifically an emphasis on platitudes and impractical advice like directing kids to raise their hands whenever they cross the street.

"Not once during the day were students told of the rightful place of pedestrians in the urban environment," the blog complained, "and not once was auto traffic depicted as anything other than an uncontrollable force of nature."



(Nathan Tempey/Gothamist)

The Brookhaven Safety Town curriculum was developed in-house by the town's Highway Department. With the exception of the direction to dismount bicycles at every railroad crossing and an off-the-cuff, un-sourced remark tailored to the visiting reporters—"In New York City they have a lot of issues with pedestrians being hit by cyclists, the cyclists going fast"—the advice was encouragingly practical, and made clear that distracted drivers are menaces careening around in tons of rolling metal.

The teachers instructed kids how to identify stop signs from a distance, how to read walk/don't walk and traffic signals, to make eye contact with stopped drivers before walking out in front of them, how to properly tighten a bicycle helmet, how to hand-signal, and to stay on the right side of the street and wear bright clothing when riding a bike. They also covered the basics of driving—keep space between you and the next car; two hands on the wheel at all times—but it was clear that this was not a driver's ed class.

In a final bit of instruction before unleashing the students on the course, Ramaci warned the class, "Repeat after me: safety cars."

"Very good. So when we get outside is anybody going to make a mistake and think they're bumper cars?"

"No," the class intoned.

"Because where are we right now?"

"Safety Town."

Outside, teachers split students into three groups: one of pedestrians, to navigate the town's crosswalks; another of cyclists, to tackle the bike lane network; and the third of drivers, who got to traverse the tunnels and overpasses of the town.

Opened in 2009, Brookhaven's Safety Town is modeled after the long-running one in the Nassau County hamlet of East Meadow. Brookhaven officials are hazy on the details, but say the course was built with federal grant money, with local businesses donating various supplies and labor. The courses are free to schools except for bus parking fees, with Boy and Girl Scout and individual classes in the summer, and are typically booked a year out, according to organizers.

The 20 mini-cars, including four teen-sized ones and two two-seaters, are battery-powered—one house on the course, across from the mock elementary school, doubles as a garage where they're charged—and made in Italy. Similar go-karts can cost thousands. Wraparound fenders provide an extra layer of protection, which is handy when turning over the controls to a bunch of third graders.



Brookhaven highway Superintendent Dan Losquadro (Nathan Tempey/Gothamist)

"They're pretty much bumper cars," town highway Superintendent Dan Losquadro said, standing at the edge of the road course. Behind him, a girl with a stuck accelerator pedal (or a lead foot) crashed into the back of a tidy line of little drivers stopped at a red light. This would repeat itself several times over the next hour. Fortunately, the cars were set to not go faster than a casual walk.

Safety Town, Losquadro said, is an important precursor to driver's ed, "because this is the age most kids have learned to ride a two-wheeler, and they’re gaining a little bit of autonomy from their parents. Their parents feel a little more comfortable letting them ride their bike, not just maybe down the block but maybe a couple of neighborhoods over to a friend’s house."

"This is that age where children are...out on their own and they really need to be reinforced at this point what those rules of the roads are," he added.



Teachers Karen Harper, left, and Veronica Ramaci demonstrate rules of the road using working pedestrian and traffic signals. (Nathan Tempey/Gothamist)

The town of Brookhaven stretches from the Long Island Sound to Fire Island and takes up a large chunk of Suffolk County, incorporating many villages and hamlets. It is home to 486,000 people, and Losquadro emphasized, more than 3,300 lane-miles of road (including more bike lanes than the first-time visitor might expect), about a sixth of what New York City has, and more than twice Buffalo's road space.

Brookhaven's roads are chaotic, too. As of last year, Suffolk County had led the state in drunk driving crashes and drunk driving fatalities since 2001. In 2014, 30,897 crashes happened in the county, 116 of them fatal. By comparison, New York City, with more than five times the population, had 205,929 crashes that year, killing 257 people. Centerreach, the Brookhaven hamlet where the schoolchildren we met came from, is also home to a libertarian (and chemtrail) activist named Stephen Ruth, who is facing a 17-count felony indictment for sabotaging red light cameras, charges he readily admits to because he considers the cameras part of a creeping extortionist police state.

Losquadro said that there are plenty of Brookhaven adults who could stand to be sent back to Safety Town.

"Driving on the road every day, as I do...unfortunately I see a lot of people who are very distracted, who pay no mind to the vehicular traffic laws," he said. "And there are unfortunately a lot of people on the road who could benefit from going back through a course like this and getting a refresher."