The David Engwicht Story

David Engwicht David Engwicht has nearly twenty years experience in working with cities all over the world in developing alternative approaches to traffic problems. He has pioneered social programs such as the Walking School Bus, Red Sneaker Week, Neighbourhood Pace Car and the Traffic Reduction Treaty. His latest innovation is the DIY Traffic Taming KIT.

David is passionate about creating child-friendly cities and has been at the forefront of experimenting with ways to get children walking to school. His pioneering work on programs like Red Sneaker Week have inspired many of today’s leaders in the active-transportation field.

In 1996 David made a breakthrough discovery: The speed of traffic on residential streets is governed, to a large extent, by the degree to which residents have psychologically retreated from their street. Over the next 9 years he conducted experiments in neighbourhoods all over the world that showed that rebuilding the social life of the street dramatically reduces traffic speeds. In 2005, David published the book Mental Speed Bumps: the smarter way to tame traffic which explains why building the social life of the street automatically slows traffic.

In 2001, together with Dr. Ingrid Burkett, David co-founded Creative Communities International, an organization dedicated to incubating social innovations. In 2006, the major focus of CCI is to establish an International City Collaborative, a world-wide learning community working together to establish best practice in combining social programs and Community-Building Street Design in taming traffic, promoting active transportation and building community.

How it began

In 1987 David headed up a community fight to stop a road widening in his home suburb in Brisbane, Australia. Early in the campaign, David argued that their community should not try and push the problem into someone else’s backyard, but should instead search for city-wide and long-term solutions. He also argued that residents had to take personal responsibility for their car use which was demanding the road be widened.

Twelve months later, without any prior experience in transport or urban design, David authored the now influential booklet, Traffic Calming: The Solution to Route 20 and a New Vision for Brisbane. This booklet is widely recognized as having triggered the Traffic Calming revolution in many cities in Australia and North America.

In 1992, disappointed with the way cities were implementing the concepts in Traffic Calming, David wrote Reclaiming our Cities and Towns (also published under the title Towards an Eco-City: Calming the Traffic) which went on to become a text in university courses. This book changed public policy on transport at the highest level, including cities such as Edinburgh. It was also in this book that David proposed the idea of the Walking School Bus — an invention which has since been picked up world-wide.

David then worked as a consultant in the UK, Italy, Canada, USA, New Zealand and Australia.

In 1995 David began experimenting with ways of enabling residents to solve their own traffic problems. In 1999 the findings from these experiments were published in the book Street Reclaiming: Creating Livable Streets and Vibrant Communities. It proposed a radical new design process for our streets so they once again become places for community building, places that feed the creative wealth of the city, and places that are the engine-room of a robust local economy.

David is an artist, street philosopher, communicator, inventor and keen observer of life. He counts his lack of formal education and his marginal experiences as a child as two of his greatest assets. While maintaining his playful streak and eccentricity, David has now been embraced by the engineering profession, urban planning and design profession, safety experts and the community development profession as a leading cross-disciplinary thinker, theorist and practitioner.