Youth Climate Summit: A Green Trinity Lane
By Nia Smith, Community Design Coordinator
3 min read High school students share their design ideas for a safer, greener Trinity Lane
Credits: Cumberland River Compact
The Civic Design Center is working to improve health and safety in Nashville’s Bordeaux and Haynes neighborhoods through equitable urban planning. The project addresses disparities by enhancing public spaces and transportation infrastructure. Key interventions include revitalizing Lock One Park to provide accessible recreational space, redesigning Trinity Lane into a climate-resilient Green Street, and improving pedestrian and cyclist safety on the Clarksville Pike bridge. These efforts are grounded in community engagement and aim to address historic disinvestment, promote active living, and reduce health inequities in these predominantly Black, underserved neighborhoods. This work is made possible by the TN Dept of Health.
In March 2025, we worked with Cumberland River Compact to create a Green Streets workshop for their Youth Climate Summit. We went over some green street design strategies with the teenagers, and together identified the impacts of climate change we hoped to mitigate.
Those impacts included:
Increased temperatures
Less adaptive plants
Intense weather conditions
Worse Air Quality
Additionally, as we spoke, the students identified problems with current street conditions:
They heat quickly
They contribute to soil erosion
There’s often flooding and puddling
Potholes and Poor maintenance worsen road conditions
After acknowledging the current issues with our streets that can be addressed by Green Street Strategies, we let the students design their own Green Street, using Trinity Lane as the model. Some of the students who were familiar with the pike were able to use lived experience to design improvements. Other students used similar pikes and the improvements they wished to see to drive their designs. Below is some of our favorite sketches, showing a greener and safer Trinity Lane.
This image by a Hunter’s Lane student shows a car lane reduction for both directions of travel. The reduced lanes can now serve as planting buffers and a bike lane. Additionally, the sidewalk widths are expanded by 3’.
This Ravenwood High School student’s rendering shows a canopy protected streetscape that takes multi-modal transportation to a new level! Dedicated bus, bike, and car travel lanes in either direction create a street boulevard that celebrates movement along the pike.
This student, age 18 from McGavock High is already thinking like an engineer. Questions about cost and construction timing are of huge concern to them, and the other drivers along this route. Their design includes solar-powered shading and a median. Many of the design solutions have thoughtful considerations behind them, like trees for soil stability, and markings for utilities under the road.
A fantastic artistic rendering, this student from Hume Fogg has removed a travel lane to improve drainage along the pike. Permeable pavers make up the sidewalks, ensuring runoff can easily enter the soil and approach the river.
You can view some more of the Green Street designs by the students below. If you’d like to share your opioions on the future of Trinity Lane, you can drop a comment at the end of this post! We’ll be sharing more information about the whole REACH Grant throughout the spring.
