DODGING TRAFFIC ISN'T CONDUCIVE TO HAVING FUN.

Addison DelMastro makes the point one way.  "How do you get suburbanites and small-town Americans to embrace car-free streets? Have a festival!"  He continues with food for thought.  "When easy parking is your major selling point, maybe you don’t really have all that much to sell."

It might be, as he concludes, that closing streets for art markets or the like is for special occasions.

It’s not that towns can really be exactly like this all the time. It’s more that we have a hard time imagining any alternative to driving everywhere, spreading out homes, and treating classic urbanism as a sort of open-air museum to visit once in awhile.

I almost wonder if our attitudes about work and leisure don’t have something to do with this. It’s almost as if we don’t do this more often because we like it; perhaps we view it as a slightly sinful indulgence, after which we have to get back to real work.

Or maybe it’s just that the convenience of quick travel and easy parking is very hard to give up—even when giving it up can give us so much in return.

On the other hand, the lesson might generalize. Is playing Frogger really the way to get psyched up for a day at the beach?

A typically popular beach area that lies alongside a busy and active street in Pewaukee is raising some concerns.

Pewaukee village board president Jeffrey Knutson says the board looked at ways to make the area safer, including lowering the speed limit and installing speedbumps. Except, he says, that may not be enough.

"There's been a lot of near misses with people jaywalking across the street and also little kids running across the street," said Knutson.

It might be that the village's stroad design creates the "jaywalking," but let's take small victories where we can.

That's why the board is now looking at the possibility of removing parking spaces along a portion of Wisconsin Avenue.

"By taking out the parking we're going to eliminate people from jetting across, and jaywalking, not only from the parking area but also from the beach," said Knutson.

The parking spaces are occupied almost all day (and there might be traffic congestion with cruisers waiting for those spots to open up) but some business owners fret about how losing a parking space in front of their shop cuts down on casual traffic.

It might be that a Pewaukee beach area where beach goers don't have to play Frogger might be more conducive to window shopping,  Let's see, in a university town far from any beaches, whether providing more outdoor space in front of businesses along the high street, whether the casual shopping and browsing increases.