Pointing Hair Dryers at Speeding Drivers, Toilet Plunger Bike Lanes, and More Unconventional yet Effective Ways to #SlowTheCars

A while back, we shared a post on social media that gave us a bit of a chuckle:

To say that you guys liked it is an understatement. Strong Towns fans went nuts for this piece. We’re talking 2,400-shares-nuts. We’re talking eighty percent engagement rates-nuts. You guys loved “Montana Woman With Hair Dryer” so much that you all but demanded that she run for president in 2020. (Her name is Patti Baumgartner, by the way. We’re a 501c3, so we can’t officially endorse her, but we gotta say, President Patti does have a ring to it…)

But what we like the most about this story is something that could easily be overlooked while you’re scrolling through your social feed: often, seemingly silly interventions like this really do slow down car traffic. And best of all, they don’t require a multi-million dollar traffic study or a permanent, landscape-altering structure that your local transportation department would need to approve. We’ve talked, again and again, at Strong Towns about how the smartest local governments actually encourage their citizens to stage their own tactical urbanism experiments, record a little data on how road users react, and report back on what they’ve learned. And the really smart ones make the most successful citizen experiments semi-permanent, iterate a little more, and then put some real money behind these bottom-up ideas.

Here are five stories to inspire you to have a little fun when you #SlowTheCars in your town: inspired by our newest hero, Patti B.

1. The Pumpkin-Protected Bike Lane

Still looking for a use for those swiftly-decomposing Jack-O-Lanterns once decorative gourd season is on the wane? Bike Durham has a great idea to discourage drivers from drifting into the bike lane—because no one likes scooping pumpkin viscera out of their tire treads.

This is just one twist on a grand tradition of people putting stuff in the street to turn a relatively useless paint-on-the-ground bike lane into a temporary protected lane where you can breathe just a little easier while cars drive by. #NeverForget the toilet plunger bike lane, the Solo cup bike lane, and even the tomato-protected bike lane. And they work so brilliantly precisely because they’re weird: what driver wouldn’t slow down to gawk a little at a bunch of fruit lined neatly in the street, or a row of pumpkins screaming for dear life?

What could you protect a bike lane with?

(Image and video via Shaun King/Visual Rituals)

2. The Bolivian Traffic Zebras

HBO’s John Oliver loves them. Adorable children love them. They have their own flipping Wikipedia page. And La Paz, Bolivia’s, unconventional choice to dress their crossing guards up as humanoid zebras—to get people across the zebra crosswalks, get it?—suggests a world of zany possibilities when it comes to traffic calming.

Post up at a piano key crosswalk with a keytar and deliver an impassioned performance of every pop song you can think of with the word “walk” in the lyrics as people cross! Use a pedestrian island as ersatz stage to put on a little show for your fellow peds (if you make that show island-themed, I will high five you)!

Preposterous ideas aside: live performance has a rich tradition in tactical urbanism, and is a powerful way to #SlowTheCars. As Marielle Brown said beautifully in an article about the Bolivian traffic zebras on this very site, “The success of programs around the world that deliberately add disorder to public streets is a strong refutation of the US’s conventional approach to street design—unexpected activity, and a sense of danger and chaos can make people drive more slowly and pay more attention, while eliminating complexity can entice people to drive faster and more dangerously.” 

(Image via Wikipedia)

3. Hacked Traffic Signs

So while we’d never encourage you to hack a government-owned road sign and program it with a cheeky message...people sure seem to do it a lot! And the principle behind putting a cheeky message up on the side of the road is one that you can adopt whether or not you have the l33t hacking skillz to actually sabotage your local DOT.

While speed limit signs are just about the least effective way to calm traffic, putting an unexpected message or image on the side of the road can grab a driver’s attention just long enough to get them off of auto-pilot and hit the brakes a bit. You could go traditional, like this London neighborhood that put pictures of children in a school zone, or get creative with your signage. What roadside message do you think would get your local drivers to slow down?

(Images via The Next Web and Bikesy)

4. Get Weird (and Get Wired)

Of course, your traffic calming adventures are only limited by your imagination, your budget, and your unique talents. And while building a robotic crosswalk that magically transforms into car-deflecting barrier might not be in everyone’s skill set...well, someone built this thing. And if you decide to create a traffic calming device as spectacular as this, dear god, please email it to us so we can send you a medal or something.

(Image via YouTube)

5. Put a Twist on a Classic

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything particularly strange to #SlowTheCars. There are tons of cheap, simple, non-whimsical ways to narrow a road or gently encourage a driver to pay a little more attention to their surroundings. But if you want to start with a classic traffic calming technique and get a little silly with it later...who’s to stop you?

Remember those genius Canadians who built their own bump outs using nothing but chalk and fallen leaves? (Above image via Dave Meslin) You can put a twist on this pop-up traffic calming mainstay by burying something surprising in those leaves that can pop up as drivers approach. What better use for your decommissioned halloween lawn decorations?

Know a local restaurant that would love to turn a parking spot into a parklet for a little extra seating during the lunch rush? Why not throw a little party in that parklet to make it into even more of a driver-slowing spectacle–might we suggest by investing in some gorilla costumes and wearing them while you enjoy your meal? (Y’know, cause it’s...guerilla traffic calming? Okay, we’ll cool it with the puns.)

And if you’re a fan of using good-old-fashioned human disorder to calm traffic, you’re probably already a fan of the moving traffic calming experiment known as critical mass bike ride. Why not send out the bat signal before your next group rollout that everyone should wear a costume around a theme you pick—or not wear one, a la the World Naked Bike Ride?

However you choose to #SlowTheCars in your town, we encourage you to embrace the creative side of traffic calming—and even the outright zany. It’s a great way to make the case that our cities should be subject to the kind of constant creative evolution that, over time, makes them truly strong.

Got an unconventional traffic calming approach you’d love to share with us? Post it to social media and tag @StrongTowns.

Cover photo via Flickr.

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