The thing I look for first and foremost when moving to a new place is a great neighborhood, meaning the people more than the houses. I knew we picked a good one, but this week drove that point home.

Let me back up. A few months ago a family with young kids about midway down our block put a couple of those yellow signs out in the street warning drivers to slow down. I didn’t think much about it. After about a month of that, they replaced those signs with giant ones, like you’d see in front of a preschool or daycare center, and moved them about a car width into the street. I thought it was dumb, but ignored it. Just before the home tour last month, the signs disappeared.

On Mother’s Day morning, I walked around to the front yard and and saw that neighbor having a heated conversation with my next door neighbor. I made myself scarce, but my next door neighbor stopped by later to explain. The guy down the street had accused him of complaining to the city about the signs, claiming that “friends at city hall” had looked up the complaint. The guy next door is the last person who would have done that, and after thinking about it awhile, he realized that the complaint probably referred to the 6200 block (his house number is 6200). That made sense to me; maybe the code enforcement people who were clearing the streets for the home tour buses had called it in.

Flash forward to yesterday. I was sitting in my front office when I noticed city workers installing a speed limit sign right between our house and our neighbors’. I took a walk around the block and found that not only were there speed limit 30mph signs at each end of our street (with a bonus No Parking sign at the other end), but one of those giant electronic speed display signs (“Your Speed: 18mph”) signs parked in front of the guy down the street! Our block has stop signs at each end, and is always so full of parked cars that it would be nearly impossible to drive the speed limit on it. Kids play in their front yard all the time without danger. The signs were unnecessary, and the electronic sign was ludicrous.

Here’s where the neighborhood comes in. I went out for an hour and a half bike ride today, and by the time I got back, the electronic sign was gone, and my inbox was full of emails from neighbors who had banded together and contacted the president of the historic district association, our city council woman, the city transportation department, and a columnist for the weekly independent paper who lives down the street. Apparently the guy who had to take down personal signs had then requested official signs, a traffic study, as well as speed bumps and a lower speed limit due to “excessive speeding” on our street (which doesn’t happen). People here were livid, and according to people who called the city, the bureaucrats were surprised by the wrath of the neighborhood. There will be no speed bumps, no lowered limit, and the other signs will probably be removed. The city has also been alerted to the fact that this guy used a friend with pull to get this done without following proper procedure, which requires a petition signed by a majority of the people on the block for new no parking signs to be installed. I don’t expect anything to be done about that, but it was nice to see how swiftly things moved to right at least some of the wrongs.