The intersection at Fairmount Ave. and Dwight Ave. now has traffic signals and streetlights to make school crossing safer. | Photo Courtesy of City Heights Life
By Staff
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Walking to Florence Griffith-Joyner Elementary School is no longer such a risky experience for kids.
The city has completed a $1.2 million project that includes new sidewalks, new traffic-calming pop-outs on corners, and a new traffic light on busy Fairmount Avenue.
San Diego officials gathered last month to celebrate the completion of the Florence Griffith-Joyner Elementary School Safe Routes to School Project.
Students at Joyner Elementary aren’t the only ones who will be benefit. Monroe Clark Middle School sits just two blocks east. About 750 students attend the elementary school; some 1,200 attend Monroe Clark.
Then-Interim Mayor Todd Gloria said the $1.2 million project was “well worth the investment to provide the safety enhancements that were needed to provide safe and adequate walking routes to schoolchildren, general pedestrians and bicyclists.”
The project was funded through a state grant and local transportation tax money.
Upgrades began last August, and most of the construction was done several months later. After putting up with traffic delays, residents in the area now have a new traffic signal at Fairmount Avenue and Dwight Street, pop-outs and storm drains on Myrtle Avenue and Thorn Street, and new sidewalks, curbs and gutters.
The improvements are the most recent in a series of upgrades targeted for this corner of City Heights. A few months ago, several hundred residents transformed a neglected patch of dirt at the mouth of Manzanita Canyon a couple of blocks away into a neighborhood oasis called the Manzanita Gathering Place. And just around the corner, Ocean Discovery Institute is building an 11,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art science laboratory at the rim of the canyon for local schoolchildren.
