Here’s a fascinating follow-up to another post submitted by Scot Bathgate on home-grown traffic calming in, of all places, Dallas. 
It began last year in a neighbourhood called Oak Cliff, where local activists, almost spontaneously, created their own complete street on a village shopping street – here (and right).
This year, something more ambitious:
First there was a Better Block; then, a Better Boulevard; then, just yesterday, a Better Bridge. Of all the efforts to temporarily transform a piece of the city into something other than what it is, yesterday’s brief installation atop the Cedar Crest Bridge, which connects Oak Cliff to South Dallas ….
But in some ways, it was the most successful, because this installation … shut down traffic an entire half of a bridge over the Great Trinity Forest and the river itself.
Organizers didn’t need to schlep out shade coverings; the canopy provided its own; the crowd was a mix of young and old, black and white, bike riders and a man riding a horse; and there was no need for entertainment save for the graciously provided binoculars spread across the span of bridge occupied by the event. …
This time, the elected officials are really on board … and on bridge:
Council members who strolled the scene — Dwaine Caraway, Pauline Medrano, Carolyn Davis, Linda Koop, Angela Hunt — were enamored of the project; they envisioned block parties, concerts, using it as a space to bridge the gap, as it were, between neighborhoods that simply drive past each other without a second glance. They spoke of the opportunities for economic development as the base of the bridge, from both directions, and of how this reminded them of Austin — something, you know, scenic.
The bridge story is amazing especially after you look at the bridge and area with Google Maps, you see it is in an industrial area but you also see that the bridge is totally over built for the amount of traffic on the Google satellite view or street view.