You, too, can calm traffic in your own home town. If you’re a Brit, you might try placing a lovely 3-piece living room suite in your road. No, I’m not kidding. According to the BBC:

Initially the street was legally closed, to allow the setting up of this outdoor living room, including such middle-England touches as a standard lamp.

It was then re-arranged to allow traffic to pass through, but Mr Dewan says the reactions of motorists showed how motorists expect nothing to stand in their way.

“A driver of a 4×4 didn’t so much disapprove – he was too crazed and violent for that. He seemed to be made psychotic by the idea that roads could exist for anything other than him to drive on,” he says….

It’s this sense of entitlement that he says he wants to challenge – leaving a 4×4 blocking half the street is called parking but a couple of chairs and a magazine rack put in the same place is seen as a senseless provocation.

Here in the boring old United States, the same impulse –to make our cities liveable and enjoyable places — drives what’s called “New Urbanism,” which so far is the province of only a few forward-thinking urban designers, architects, and real estate developers. Pragmatists that we Americans are, we try to design good solutions for the future; those crazy Brits just engage in performance art. On the other hand, maybe the Brits have a good idea: perfomance art done now might make cities of the future into places where cars and pedestrians can co-exist on the same streets, and have fun at the same time.

In fact, here in New Bedford, when Home Depot goes to demolish the historic Fairhaven Mills building to put up their new “category killer” store (a store which will add an insane amount of insane traffic to that street) — maybe someone should set up a beautiful living room suite. You know, a sort of performance art piece in front of the bulldozers — photograph the bulldozers running over a dining room table on the way to the mill building — show the photographs at the New Bedford Art Museum. It would be a hilarious artistic statement about what the ironically-named Home Depot really does to our home city.

Just thinking out loud… feel free to steal this idea….