Bob CollinsIn a smaller community, people know who the neighbors are that want traffic to slow down on the residential street and when restrictions come to the ‘hood, the whole “nice people in small town” thing gets pitched out the window.
Take Alexandria, Minn., for example where the city is experimenting with a garden in the middle of the street to slow down the commuters who use Fifth Avenue to avoid stoplights on a nearby thoroughfare.
“We know there’s going to be positives and negatives. People know that we’re behind this, and they have targets on our backs,” Tami Sik tells the Alexandria Echo Press. “They’ve driven by and screamed profanities at us and threatened us.”
Minnesota Nice, eh?
The temporary “gardens” are actually roundabouts. Nothing can inflame the Minnesota passion like a roundabout.
“Education about roundabouts is a big problem nowadays,” resident Josh Burnett tells the paper. He’s not a fan. “Stop signs are more effective because they can actually be enforced. It’s easy to go through a roundabout wrong, but the word ‘stop’ is universal. The only reason the roundabout has been supposedly ‘working’ is because people avoid the street now and go a different route.”
Mission accomplished.
