MSEA-SEIU Member Jonathan French Writes Children’s Book on Roundabouts
PHOTO: Jonathan French displays one of the many illustrations in his new children's book, "Ronda Loves Roundabouts," published through the transportation education and advocacy group Build The
Era.
The following comes from the Maine Service Employees Association newsletter:
Perhaps more so than anyone in Maine, MSEA-SEIU Member Jonathan French knows the value of roundabouts in helping all of us get to our destinations safely whether by car, truck, foot or bike. A professional engineer who works for the MaineDOT, Jonathan designed the Orono roundabout on Route 2 that opened in 2018 and the West Gardiner Service Plaza roundabout that opened in 2015. He has the statistics to show roundabouts lead to fewer crashes, injuries and deaths compared to signalized intersections.
Yet he also knows there hasn’t been much education in Maine or nationwide on how roundabouts make traveling safer for all of us. So, a year ago, on his own time, he embarked on a project to educate both current and future generations of road users about roundabouts in Maine and nationwide in order to increase their acceptance and implementation. His idea: to write an illustrated children’s book about roundabouts.
With strong support and help from volunteers from the transportation education and advocacy group Build The Era that he cofounded, Jonathan has written the children’s book “Ronda Loves Roundabouts” that the group has now published. The book is the first children’s book about roundabouts to be published in the United States. Copies are available here for $15 plus shipping. Watch the book-launch video here and a promotional video here.
“If you look right now, there really hasn’t been a nationwide education campaign on roundabouts and they’ve been used in the United States for over 30 years,” said Jonathan, who is president of our Transportation Chapter and a Transportation Engineer III and Engineering Data Manager for MaineDOT. “Other countries such as the United Kingdom have done a better job on educating users about roundabouts...For Americans, we rely on driver education for road-user education, so most children don’t see material about roundabouts until they reach their teenage years, if at all.”
French pointed out that children learn about traffic signals before they know how to read and the same should be true for roundabouts because they save lives and make our communities a better place to live.
"In order for the traffic signal to become widely accepted and mass implemented in the early 20th century, children’s entertainment was used to teach about them years before somebody would get behind a steering wheel," he said. "It is still being used in the present day, so there is little to no resistance to traffic signal projects. Build The Era hopes this book will be the start of children’s entertainment being used to provide education about roundabouts for their acceptance and mass implementation in the United States during the 21st century.”
Ronda Bout, the main character in “Ronda Loves Roundabouts” is the purple, roundabout-looking transportation advocate of Build The Era. In the book, Ronda and her sidekick, Bee, a flying bee, explain the ins-and-outs of roundabout usage as a driver, pedestrian and bicyclist with strong support from Liyin Yeo’s illustrations. Ronda is “passionate about safety, complete streets, climate justice and especially roundabouts,” the book notes.
