Wake County's Poe Center opens traffic-safety course for kids
Wake County families now have a place to let children practice road safety before summer play turns into a real-world risk on bikes, scooters and sidewalks.
The Poe Center for Health Education has opened a hands-on traffic-safety course in Wake County that lets children practice the rules of the road in a controlled setting before they head into neighborhoods, school routes and busy sidewalks.
The course is built for the summer moments when kids are out on bikes, scooters and foot traffic more often, and when families have few safe places to rehearse judgment around moving cars. In one scene tied to the new setup, Harris Rollins learned scooter skills with a group from a Durham summer camp, showing how the program turns everyday play into traffic training.
Ann Rollins, the Poe Center’s executive director, said the organization does not want more fatalities and sees learning the right way as a way to build healthy habits for life. The course is open to the public on weekends, making it a community option parents can use repeatedly through the summer rather than a one-time classroom lesson.
The timing fits a larger safety problem in North Carolina. The North Carolina Department of Transportation says almost 200 bicyclists and pedestrians are killed each year in the state by motor vehicles. Through Watch for Me NC, the agency says more than 3,000 pedestrians and 850 bicyclists are hit by drivers annually, and about 180 people are killed. NCDOT says those pedestrian and bicycle crash numbers help identify trends and improve road safety, and its crash maps are updated each year.
Nationally, the Governors Highway Safety Association estimated 7,148 pedestrian deaths in the United States in 2024, a 4.3% drop from 2023, but still nearly 20% above the 2016 level. North Carolina’s 2024 crash facts report showed traffic fatalities rose 2.7% from 2023, keeping pedestrian and bicyclist safety squarely in the state’s traffic picture.
That makes the Poe Center course more than a summer activity. It gives Wake County children a place to practice crossing, scanning for cars and sharing space with bikes and scooters before they face those choices on their own. NCDOT’s WalkBikeNC safety page says North Carolina is one of the least safe states for walking and bicycling and points to education and enforcement as part of the fix.
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