After five years as the director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, Emiko Atherton is departing Smart Growth America in July. She has made an indelible impact on the national, state, and local push for implementing safer streets that everyone can enjoy.
Beth Osborne and Emiko Atherton
“Safety has been one of Transportation for America’s three core priorities and the Coalition has been working hand in glove with T4America to further that goal over the last few years—and will continue,” said Beth Osborne. “We will desperately miss Emiko’s powerful impact as an advocate but we take comfort in knowing that she has helped build a nationwide network of other advocates who will continue to join us in advancing the urgent issue of safety for everyone.”
A decade into its existence, the Coalition had been massively successful in encouraging states and localities to pass Complete Streets policies. But Emiko recognized that many of these policies were failing to impact actual projects on the ground. This, along with a lack of emphasis on equity, was resulting in policies that were failing to make streets safer, especially for the most vulnerable. Emiko guided the Coalition through a sea change to make equity and implementation the focus of the Coalition’s local policy work, overhauling the scoring system for grading policies to require a clear path to implementation and a clear focus on equity to receive a high score.
Emiko conceived and ran a series of Safe Streets Academies to test out creative approaches to safer street design, working with teams from South Bend, IN; Orlando, FL; Lexington, KY; Pittsburgh, PA; Huntsville, AL; and Durham, NC to build skills in safer street design, creative placemaking, and community engagement, and then put these skills into practice.
After more than a decade publishing the Dangerous by Design report across various Smart Growth America programs, Emiko helped push pedestrian safety further into the spotlight as a reliably powerful spokesperson in national media about the crisis of people being struck and killed while walking. She also helped bring a new focus to the racial disparities—Black Americans and American Indian or Alaska Native people are disproportionately killed compared to people of other races—helping recast the report’s narrative around improving equity.
Along with Ben Stone, SGA’s director of arts & culture, she conceived and assembled Intersections, the first national conference on Complete Streets and creative placemaking, bringing together engineers and planners with artists and advocates to learn from one another at the only conference of its kind.