|
|
|
 |
I was on tour to publicize my book Street Reclaiming, my first tentative reporting of the lessons I had learned from the Henry Street experiment. I arrived at an afternoon public meeting in Boise, Idaho, to find three television news crews waiting on the steps of the hall. We were running very late. So I told them I would have to do a joint news conference rather than one-on-one interviews. But my host had other ideas. ‘Get him to set up his Street Reclaiming Chair’, he said to the reporters. I replied that we were already late, but he simply said, ‘I will tell the people waiting inside that this is part of your presentation’. So I set the chair up right in the middle of the intersection outside the hall, taking up about as much space as a mini-roundabout. Soon the traffic began to back up as each driver queued to ask me what was happening. The cue got longer if I took longer to answer their question. But there was something very un-American about this traffic queue – no one got angry. Instead there were waves, smiles, good humour and lots of banter. One driver even asked if I minded him joining me. ‘Be my guest’, I replied, not having a clue what he meant by joining me. He parked his car, went to the truck and took out a flute. He came over and began playing classical music and dancing around my chair. All this activity caused people to come out of their houses. For some reason, the fact that I was in the centre of their street seemed to legitimize residents holding their conversations, not on the sidewalk, but right in the middle of the street. Kids brought out their bikes and pedal cars and began riding around in the street. And the motorists continued to queue patiently, waiting to ask, ‘So what’s going on here?’. The media thought we had staged this entire event, but it was completely spontaneous. Why did the motorists queue patiently? Intrigue. When we are intrigued we are faced with a situation that does not make immediate sense. Why would someone be sitting in the middle of an intersection on a brightly coloured throne? Being curious creatures, we want to know what is happening and why it is happening. We want the full story. Our curiosity must be satisfied. We all have a storyteller living in our heads. The storyteller derives great pleasure from gathering all the pieces of a puzzle and trying to create a picture from the disparate pieces. The more mysterious the pieces of the puzzle, the greater our level of engagement in trying to guess the story. This insight about intrigue has had an important application for the Instant Street Reclaiming events that I organize. One of my cardinal rules has become ‘No Signs’. Signs decapitate intrigue. Imagine if, when I set up my Street Reclaiming Chair in the Boise intersection, I had put up a sign saying ‘Warning: Australian author deliberately holding up traffic’. I would have destroyed the intrigue factor. Intrigue only works as long as we allow the mystery and ambiguity to remain. The observer must be left unaided to unearth the story behind what they observe. In fact, intrigue is an irresistible challenge to the storyteller in the head of the motorist. Why did the motorists queue patiently at the Boise intersection? The storyteller in the head of each motorist had to know if the story they had constructed was remotely right. When we are intrigued and in storyteller mode, we must observe the smallest details because it is often the smallest details that unlock the mystery of the ‘what’s the story?’ puzzle. You can’t observe minute details while driving fast. You must slow down, or even stop. The reason I developed a golden rule of no official signs for Instant Street Reclaiming events was that signs kill intrigue. Once the story has been told, the storyteller in the motorist’s head is sated, and the ‘driver’ resumes control and they can get back to what they were doing before the storyteller became intrigued – speeding to some destination. The longer we can keep the person intrigued, the longer they will slow down. So the absence of signs helps bring speeds down, making it safe for us to be in the street in the first place. This insight into the role of intrigue in reducing traffic speed has significant implications for the design of our streets. Standardized traffic control devices and signs do not require the storyteller in our head to be engaged. The story has already been told by an engineer. A speed bump says: ‘slow down or be severely jolted!’. But there is a human story behind every speed bump and traffic control device, a story that has been lost in the telling. For example, imagine a street in which a child is knocked from their bike and killed. The residents do the only thing they know – lobby for traffic calming. The residents fight city hall for two years, and finally win, getting a series of speed bumps in their street. But the motorists driving down this street have absolutely no idea about the story behind the speed bumps. The only story they read is, ‘Idiot engineer/residents forcing me to slow down!’. But what if the residents had known about the power of intrigue. What if they suspended a child’s bike above the street, a bike being led by a seagull. On the bike is a flag that reads, ‘Jane, may you ride forever’. Now the storyteller in the motorists’ head is forced to be engaged and slow down to collect the clues. Why is there a child’s bike suspended over the street? Why the seagull and sign: ‘Jane, may you ride forever’? Ah, Jane must have been a child killed riding her bike in this street. How old was she? I wonder if she looked like my daughter when she was eight? How would I feel if it were my daughter that was killed? This suspended bike over the street tells a far more powerful story than a series of speed bumps. Even a pedal car left in the middle of the street tells a more compelling story than a speed bump. There must be kids living in this street. Why did they leave their pedal car there? Have they gone for afternoon tea? Will they come back? Ah, I remember when I use to ride my pedal car in the street. I got it for my sixth birthday. Engineers (and remember I am not beating up on engineers) love standardization, which not only means that they tell the same story over and over, but the story behind the story is totally lost and debased. Intrigue is one of those magic feelings that changes our perception of time. A good storyteller can keep us spellbound for hours. Time can stand still. The storyteller in our head can do the same. Therefore, when we intrigue motorists we engage their storyteller and change their relationship to time. They move from automated machine governed by the ticking clock in which seconds are dollars, to playful child absorbed in the never-ending now, where there are no limits and everything is possible. In fact, when we are in storytelling mode, the clock is a curse because it demands that we re-enter the boring world of the mundane. This is why the motorists at the Boise intersection queued patiently. They had been switched from motoring mode into storytelling mode. They were not held up in traffic. They were telling themselves a good yarn. Before continuing, let me pre-empt a major objection to the mental speed bumps approach to taming traffic, particularly the removal of all traffic control devices. Many people have said, ‘Ah, that will never work in Australia or the USA because the drivers are more impatient and rude than they are in Europe’. Leaving aside for a moment the very subjective judgment that drivers in these countries are more impatient, this objection misses the key way in which mental speed bumps calm drivers subconsciously; they switch the driver persona off and the storytelling persona on. Australians and North Americans are just as prone to becoming absorbed in a good yarn as Europeans. My major proving ground for the power of mental speed bumps, as epitomized in the story above, has been the USA. Let me tell one other story that underlines the power of intrigue to tame drivers subconsciously. When I first started doing Instant Street Reclaiming events, I would often find that residents were so angry with traffic that they would shake their fists and yell at the drivers. In the early days I used to instruct residents to unclench their fist and their teeth, and to smile and wave at the motorists. My reason was fairly simple. You can’t expect motorists to act like a guest in your street if you are going to treat them as an enemy. But I soon found an extraordinary outcome when people stopped shaking their fist and waved instead. Without fail, the residents would exclaim: ‘My goodness, they really do go much slower’. What was happening in the motorist’s head? Well when you shake your fist and yell at someone, you don’t need to slow down to work out the story. The message is as blunt as a speed bump. Thousands of years of evolutionary conditioning kicks in and tells the motorist: ‘Enemy! Stop and fight, or flee quick!’. In fact, a closed fist does exactly the opposite to what the residents are actually requesting. It tells the motorist to speed up. But when people smile and wave, there is no immediately obvious story. First we have to slow down enough to see if they are friends or acquaintances. If we do not immediately recognize their faces, then we must slow down even further to see if they might be someone we once met, but haven’t seen for a long time. When we still do not recognize them the mystery deepens. Is this a special day I am not aware of? Maybe they mistook me for someone else? Or maybe this is an incredibly friendly neighbourhood? The storyteller in the motorist’s head may stay engaged for some blocks. Meanwhile, the driver in their head has taken a back seat. To see the next chapter, see the sample pages where you can read Mental Speed Bump 2: Uncertainty by downloading the pdf. |
David tells how he accidentally discovered Mental Speed Bumps - 5 min. 
 David reads chapter 2: Mental Speed Bump 1: Intrigue - 12min.
|
