Andy Hinds | Parenting

A few months ago, my family and I were at a playground that featured some rough, car-like structures. The kids were pretending to drive them, and having the kinds of conversations they associated with operating motor vehicles. One of my 3-year-old twin girls, behind the wheel of a blue jalopy made of steel bars, hollered over to her sister sitting in a similar contraption: “Hey buddy! Slow down!”

My wife started laughing and pointing at me, saying something about how the kid was just like her old man.

I acted like I didn’t know what she was talking about, but secretly I was proud.

Ever since our kids got to the age where they need to go on at least one automobile excursion per day – lest they drive their main childcare provider (me) nuts – I’ve become acutely aware of the scofflaws who cruise the streets of our neighborhood with no regard for the big signs that say “Speed Limit 25.”

Our house happens to be on one of the main North-South arteries of North Park. The road is wide and straight, and even though it’s clearly residential and the speed limit is well posted, it seems to encourage lead feet. I must admit that, before I became a dad, I probably put the hammer down between stop signs myself when I was running late. But now I monitor not only my own speed, but also that of every motorist who rolls down my street.

At least once a day, I load my kids into our minivan, which we park on the curb in front of the house; at least once a day, I have to unload them. This requires standing on the street as traffic whizzes by, futzing around with wiggly children and their NASCAR-style, five-point safety harnesses, and then transferring them safely to the curb. It’s really the most dangerous part of the journey. So when I see some yahoo blasting down the street at 40 miles per hour, I do what any concerned dad would: I make myself into a human traffic cone.

Usually, when I stand in the middle of the lane and mad-dog the driver of the oncoming car, flashing twos and fives with my fingers, they slows down to a crawl, if only to avoid scratching their paint with my bone fragments. But sometimes they’ll skirt around me and continue hurtling through the neighborhood. That’s when I yell.

Reactions from speeding motorists to my vigilante traffic direction have been as varied as the cars they drive. But aside from the predictability of receiving a one-fingered salute – which I have successfully avoided explaining to my kids – I haven’t been able to make a correlation between type of car and type of response. For instance, a cocky-looking young man in a Porsche nodded in embarrassed acknowledgement of his crime when I chastised him, whereas a 50-something woman who looked like she was speeding to make it to her Bikram yoga class flipped me off while hurling obscenities out the tiny window of her Smart Car.

There were discouraging times during my campaign for safety and justice, when I thought I would have to up the ante to have any affect. I thought about making a full-sized speed-limit sign that I could place next to the van while I loaded and unloaded the girls. I even considered keeping lifelike baby dolls handy and throwing them in front of the windshields of the most egregious offenders as they passed by.

But lately, it seems like the last two years of being that guy may be paying off. I haven’t had to yell at any drivers for months now, and I swear that cars are slowing down as soon as they see me stepping into the street from a block away. It’s been weeks since I’ve received the finger, and I can’t even recall the last time someone almost ran over my toes or mouthed obscenities at me.

So it would seem that there’s no need to plunder our city coffers to install speed bumps, median strips or those signs that tell you how fast you’re going. To deal with the problem of speeders in our residential neighborhoods, we just need to organize an Uptown Grumpy-Old-Man Patrol to wave our canes at anyone doing more than 29 miles per hour.

We could probably cut down on kids playing on people’s lawns, too, while we were at it.

—Andy Hinds is a stay-at-home dad, blogger, freelance writer, carpenter and sometimes-adjunct writing professor. He is known on the internet as Beta Dad, but you might know him as that guy in North Park whose kids ride in a dog-drawn wagon. Read his personal blog at butterbeanandcobra.blogspot.com. Reach him at [email protected] or @betadad on Twitter.