I live in a community with old, narrow, driving lanes. The streets are posted, by the town government for 20 m.p.h. traffic speed. However, about half of the drivers follow those laws, and the other half, well....don't seem to know they exist.

Bicyclists are omnipresent on these lanes, and there is plenty of wildlife, criss-crossing the lanes. Unfortunately, so many of them are caught by the headlights and speed of 2,000 pound autos driven by rushed and hurried human animals.

On many occasions, children have told me that drivers have narrowly missed running them over. And, recently, a neighbor, with a Lhasa Apso on a leash, was horrified when her puppy, was struck and killed by a car. The driver, by the way, did not stop.

So, what do you suggest? What are your thoughts? I have presented my case before the town council and got a blank look of disapproval and an unqualified "no" to any "traffic calming" devices being installed. I think that I should shirk in the dark of the night and install 6-foot tall speed bumps to a disconcerting public.

Thoughts?

I really like his insight that the solution to traffic problems depends more on social change than installation of hardware, and I think this idea is slowly becoming part of the conventional wisdom.

of course, ya gotta learn to ride the correct way to calm traffic, but it can be done once you have acquired the experience, skill, and confidence.

1) When you look at Engwicht's ideas, he actually calls for some very expensive engineering. His concepts of "rooms" are quite nice, but much more expensive to implement than "traditional traffic calming."

2) I love community driven ideas. However, the frisbee toss only works when the frisbee is being thrown. It's the other times during the 24-hour a day 365 day year that the operation of the roadway matters.

I don't endorse Engwicht's theories. Who has time to throw a frisbee at all hours of the day? It suffers, as we the tech nerds say, from a scalability problem.

We need to redesign our streets.

My only point was to share this remarkable experience.

srock, if you shorten the distance, how is the kid ever going to learn how to heave the disk? Another example of the tyranny of low expectations!