Casting a spell on speeders
By Thomas Ryll, The Columbian Staff Writer
Friday, October 21, 2005
At 3:30 Thursday afternoon, David Engwicht pedaled an odd- looking bicycle to 22nd and D streets in Vancouver, unloaded a suitcase and unfolded a purple-and-gold throne in the middle of the intersection.
For an hour or so, he sat in the throne, waved at and chatted with passing motorists, encouraged children to take his place, posed for pictures, took pictures and did newspaper interviews, all in the pursuit of what he calls "a mental speed bump."
Engwicht, who hails from Australia and variously describes himself as an "international traffic expert" and "traffic taming wizard," promotes a host of ideas that are a bit off the beaten asphalt.
The city paid his $1,200 daily fee for three days of workshops and demonstrations, including a repeat of the mental speed bump exercise at 3:30 p.m. today on Southeast Fisher Drive between 168th and 172nd avenues in east Vancouver.
Even though the Thursday show was an official city-sponsored traffic obstruction, a city code enforcement employee stopped his car in the intersection to see what the problem was.
Apparently the explanation, possibly because it was delivered by a man wearing a hand-painted silk cape and rectangular two-tone sunglasses, was not convincing. A few minutes later, another code enforcement employee showed up. He talked to city transportation planning manager Matt Ransom, who was not wearing a cape of any sort. The man left, satisfied that nobody needed to be cited for anything.
Part of Engwicht's mental speed bump theory is that the main reason traffic goes so undesirably fast on neighborhood side streets is that residents have made a "psychological retreat" from the streets, turning them over to automobiles.
"When kids used to play in the street, traffic went slowly," he said. "Telling children to play on the sidewalk gave motorists a permission slip to drive fast."
He credits a Dutch traffic engineer for discovering that removing all traffic signs, speed humps, line markings and traffic lights actually reduces traffic speeds. The lack of the usual traffic- control measures creates what Engwicht calls the mental speed bump.
All this gets complicated, because no one is recommending that parents urge their kids to play in busy streets in order to slow traffic.
Ransom said the city is besieged by residents' requests for help with slowing traffic, and that Engwicht's ideas for creating social interaction among neighbors could serve to make residents less likely to want to speed through their own neighborhoods.
Seanette Corkill, who lives at the corner, has a sign in her yard that reads "Keep children alive, drive 25."
"I have waved at people who go by too fast," she said. "Some have stopped and said, 'Do I know you?' I said, 'No, but you were driving too fast.'"
Thursday, right off the bat a motorist in a big pickup slowed to ask Engwicht what was up. "I've come from Australia to sit in your intersection," came the answer. The driver didn't hesitate with his response: "It's not my intersection."
Still, Engwicht chalked up the interaction as a success. "He slowed to talk to me, didn't he?"
It was a scene: mothers, children on bicycles, several dogs and a few pedestrians showed up. The crowd numbered 30 at one point. A red cat even ventured into the middle of the street to sniff around the throne before scooting back to curbside.
Engwicht calls himself a "social inventor." Not in the sense of the opposite of an anti-social inventor; but as someone who invents things to help society. He can go on at great length about mental speed bumps; 187 pages to be precise, the length of his small- format book, published this year.
He also lists "street philosopher" among his credentials. Catching the nuances of this philosophy takes close listening, and not only on account of his Aussie accent.
And the reader might not know at first, or ever, what to make of sentences like this: "If we are travelling through a space that has been highly rationalized, the 'story' is mono-dimensional, flat and over-familiar. But the borderlands are 'denser'. They are packed with intrigue, uncertainty and humor. The storyteller in our head is automatically engaged."
(To be fair, there is some loss of context here. It's probably all there, somewhere in those 187 pages.)
Engwicht, who lives in Brisbane, also touts a couple other traffic calming measures: the Neighborhood Pace Car and Walking School Bus.
The former involves motorists willing to post "Pace Car" placards on their vehicles and drive around town strictly obeying speed limits. The furor, and possibly gunshots, from the ensuing traffic jams would presumably be offset by overall feelings of peace and well-being among residents watching cars go by at 25 mph instead of 35 mph.
Engwicht on his Web site, www.lesstraffic.com, candidly admits that that concept "has not flourished" in any city he is aware of, "because these programs have lacked creative mechanisms for enlisting Pace Car drivers."
Or perhaps the inverse of that: Not enough drivers are willing to become the world's most unpopular motorists.
Engwicht said he invented the Walking School Bus in 1991. He suggested that an adult collect schoolkids at their front doors and lead them to class on foot. While one obvious benefit would be to offset some of the effects of too much time spent at the feed bag, Engwicht says his "deeper goal" was to give kids "independent mobility."
More recently, he has done some sole searching and decided that the Walking School Bus all too often "has outlived its usefulness and in some circumstances has become counterproductive." (Not to mention difficult to set up; one organizer, he reports, told him that 100 people applied to be drivers but that after training and background checks, only three were left.)
But Engwicht, who is on a six-week tour that has included Zurich and Paris, has more ideas. They might not appeal to the resident who wandered into Thursday's show and had his own gripes about truck traffic on Fourth Plain Boulevard and downtown's traffic signals, which are not synchronized to his liking. "Every light is its own little kingdom," he said. "It's infuriating."