DIY Traffic Calming

When the cars whip through neighborhoods at warp speed, it endangers pedestrians and makes living on these residential racetracks mighty unpleasant. No one can better tell of the woes of living on such a street than Ted Dewan, an Oxford resident who lives on a street treated as a speedway. 

Fed up with the situation, he decided to employ his own "folk traffic calming," which involves the use of bizarre and homemade devices to slow traffic. According to this BBC news article, Dewan has used "an 11-foot high rabbit, a big bed (for a sleeping policeman), a Casualty-style fake crash scene for Halloween and the setting up of a living room in the middle of the road."

Dewan says in the article that "there's an element of fun and mischief, but underneath is the ambition to encourage people to re-examine how roads are used."

Unfortunately, these devices haven't always worked as hoped. Evidently, a disgruntled motorist actually ran into his street-parked furniture, after Dewan said the motorist "seemed to be made psychotic by the idea that roads could exist for anything other than him to drive on."

So sad, so common.

[Link to must-read BBC article]