Calming Seattle's Traffic

he real innovative thinking now comes from abroad. In the late 1990s, Britain launched a "home zones" initiative to give neighborhoods an environment in which drivers find enough cues, cautions and visual evidence of neighborhood life that they slow down, more or less without regard to any traffic enforcement by police. Low-tech and often free ideas were developed by the Dutch woonerf (street for living) movement, which largely credits drivers, walkers and bicyclists with the intelligence to share a well-designed environment. Across the European Union, residential areas commonly have speed limits of 20 mph (30 kilometers per hour). Would a 20 mph limit work on Seattle's side streets?