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much more subtle and complex series of codes that are implicit through design and environment." "If I walk into your living room, I do not need a sign that says, Do Not Spit on the Floor," he explains. "Indeed, if there were such a sign, it would probably be counterproductive." Over the last few years, the shared-street concept has emigrated out of mainland Europe to the United Kingdom. In addition to home zones, which are cropping up in isolated residential developments, the city of Manchester is currently reconfiguring a major section of its central core according to shared-space principles. Hamilton-Baillie himself is working a project that he says is the first in the country to bring together all the elements of second-generation traffic calming: removing the road markings from a road that runs past a primary school in the city of Bath. It's a project, he says, that capitalizes on the area's "rich urban morphology" -- St. James Square, the school and a historic church -- to "create a series of places rather than a single highway." In the United States, as one might expect, policymakers haven't exactly embraced the virtues of ambiguity and uncertainty embodied in second-generation principles. "Woonerfs are certainly being planned on private property," says James Daisa, a project manager at Kimley-Horn Associates and a national expert on pedestrian-friendly development. "But the concept has yet to come to bear on public streets." City codes are part of the problem, he says. The reluctance of traffic engineers is another. Consider the case of Brookline, Mass., which installed a woonerf in front of a Marriott Hotel last January. A patchwork of brick pavings, the shared-space lacks big curbs, and the sidewalk and street are all at the same level. But as reporter Anthony Flint noted in the Boston Globe, the public works department botched the entire concept by painting white lines and big right-turn arrows on the street, and placing yellow-and-black-striped rectangles on the landscaped "bump-outs." "It's clear that advocates and private developers aren't sufficient to bring about a true woonerf," wrote Flint. "The traffic engineers need to be in the room, and they need to understand the concept. A fact-finding trip to the Netherlands may be in order." For their part, many American traffic engineers say one critical ingredient is missing for a system built around shared spaces to work in the United States: a communal sensibility. "We live in a culture that gives so much value to the individual and the expression of that is how we act in a car," says Robert Burchfield, a city traffic engineer in my home town of Portland, Ore., which is nationally recognized for its preservation of public space and its dedicated network of cycling lanes and pedestrian pathways. "I'm not comfortable with less order when I can't get people to go below 50 or 60 miles per hour." But this, of course, is precisely the point; redesign the street environment as an active community space, and you equalize the power