Pedestrian Power

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Engwicht's message is as simple as it radical. For nearly all of human history, he declares, streets belonged to everybody. Kids played there, dogs slept there, people stopped there to flirt or gossip. But over recent decades, beginning in Detroit and spreading over much of the world, streets have been seized for the exclusive use of cars and trucks. Most communities have never recovered from this theft. Deprived of our neighborhood gathering spots, we've retreated to the backyard or indoors to avoid the noise, smell, and danger of speeding traffic. We've withdrawn from one another in the process.

Engwicht admits he didn't realize all this until he attended a public meeting about the widening of a road near his home in a Brisbane suburb. At first he was persuaded by city officials' arguments in favor of a wider road, but he changed his mind after listening to neighbors talk about how it would affect their lives.

Although he was up to his neck in starting a window-washing business, Engwicht decided to write a rebuttal to all the assertions thrown around by "experts" who wanted to widen the road. "Because I didn't have any background in traffic engineering or urban planning, or even environmental activism, I had a fresh view," he explained to me in an expansive interview at a St. Paul brewpub during a break from the most recent ProBike/ProWalk conference, a biannual gathering of activists sponsored by the National Center for Bicycling and Walking.

In his research he discovered how citizens in the Dutch city of Delft outwitted speeding motorists by strategically placing old couches, tables, and planters in the street. Cars could still pass, but only by slowing down. When police arrived, they immediately realized the value of these illegal actions to make the streets safer. Soon city officials were devising similar methods to slow cars and "calm" traffic.

Traffic Calming, the booklet Engwicht wrote to make the case against road widening, turned the tide in his hometown and took on a life of its own. He expanded it into the book Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns, which inspired a group of neighbors and me to organize resistance to the proposed widening of an already unsafe street near our homes in Minneapolis. At a public meeting, we outlined Engwicht's ideas about traffic calming, quoting from the book and noting that streets could be redesigned so people and cars could share the space. Road-widening projects had been opposed around town many times before, but rarely stopped because city officials succeeded in branding opponents as "anti-progress." We, however, were able to win over the crowd by articulating a vision of what we were for, rather than just what we were against. The city dropped its plans to widen the avenue that very night.

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