17-year-old creates plan to make streets outside his school safer

How old is old enough to create a comprehensive transportation plan? Maybe in your 30s, or at least graduated from college, right?

Roosevelt High School student Joe Mangan didn’t wait that long. Mangan decided to develop a proposal to make the streets around his school safer for students, and he’s only 17.

“I spent a lot of time walking around, during lunch I’d go off campus to get food or things like that,” Mangan told 770 KTTH’s Jason Rantz. “I just noticed a lot of things that were wrong with the design of the area.”

Mangan determined the sidewalks were too narrow and bike lanes could be beneficial, so he decided to take action.

“There’s a software called SketchUp that I’m pretty familiar with,” Mangan said. “I, just one day, opened up my laptop and downloaded that and got started designing.”

Mangan took inspiration from places he’d traveled to flush out his plan. The bike lanes he proposes are similar to ones he says he saw in Amsterdam. Once completed, he submitted his plan to the Seattle Department of Transportation.

“Originally, I heard back from them and they said they’d get back to me within a few days,” Mangan said, “I just never heard back from them after that.”

Local news outlets covered the proposal, and the Seattle Bike Blog even lauded it as better than the SDOT’s plan. Geekwire eventually got the department to comment, but Mangan wasn’t impressed by the response.

“All they basically said was that my proposals were reflected in their design,” Mangan said.

What’s next for the wunderkind?

“I’m definitely interested in city planning as a career,” Mangan said. “I’m also interested in political science and economics and architecture, and I think that city planning is just a mixture of all those things.”

Rantz just made him promise not to become an urbanist blogger.

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