Estonia's new way to punish speeding: Make motorists stand by the road for an hour.

One can easily imagine this approach leading to violence here in America.

On the desk of a government building, a diorama is laid out. Little vehicles sit by the side of a road, watched over by little policemen. On two recent mornings, this scene was recreated in real life. Drivers caught speeding along the road between Tallinn and the town of Rapla were stopped and given a choice. They could pay a fine, as normal, or take a “timeout” instead, waiting for 45 minutes or an hour, depending on how fast they were going when stopped.

Public reaction in Estonia has been positive.

Estonians have praised the idea for being more egalitarian — monetary fines are not adjusted according to income, as in neighbouring Finland, but everyone has the same number of hours in the day — and because they perceive the punishment as being directly related to the offence, rather than an excuse to fill state coffers.

Social connections at the grassroots, or “the antidote to neoliberalism.”

Starting at the grassroots and building upward -- and knowing how to proceed based on the revolutionary idea of listening to people at the grassroots.

It doesn't result in campaign finance kickbacks from the usual top-down suspects, but it might just work.

Paging Mark Seabrook and the local GOP: our local Democrats have surrendered the initiative in such matters. It's your turn.

What do you think?

There’s an idea that could transform Britain – but Brexit won’t let it be heard, by Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian)

 ... (An idea to) utterly transform the public services we rely on from cradle to grave: an idea so bold and innovative it is winning admirers all over the world, its author summoned to address governments from Scandinavia to Latin America, its approach hailed on the opinion page of the New York Times as the “fix” for a broken welfare state – and yet all but ignored by the national government of the author’s home country, whose bandwidth is consumed entirely by Brexit.

It comes from a social entrepreneur by the name of Hilary Cottam. Full disclosure: I’ve known Cottam for years, long before she was named Designer of the Year in 2005 for her work reshaping schools, prisons and health facilities. She was subsequently described as being “to social design what Conran is to sofa design”.

I first met her in Washington in the mid-1990s, where she was ruffling feathers working for the World Bank. The bank’s modus operandi back then was to jet into a distant foreign capital, stay in a five-star hotel, conduct meetings with officials, then sign an agreement for, say, a $140m investment in a dam, before flying back to DC.

Cottam operated in a different way. She would head out of the capital, pitch up in a remote village or township on the outskirts and live for a week or two with the people of that community, talking especially to the women. After one such spell on the margins of Lusaka, Zambia, she heard what people there needed most. It involved water, but it wasn’t a dam. And it cost closer to $140 than $140m. What was it? A standpipe in the centre of the village – so that the women could collect water safely, rather than having to venture to a tap far out of the way, somewhere scary and dark. Simple, cheap – but utterly transformative of their lives.

Cottam did the same when she was tasked with turning around a failing school in the south London borough of Southwark. She talked to teachers and pupils and found that one reason children were not settling down to learn, why they acted as if they were not fully present, was that they never took off their coats. Why not? Because their lockers were in a badly lit corner where kids were liable to get bullied or beaten up, so no one ever went there. Cottam altered the design, bringing the lockers into the daylight: bullying went down and, thanks to that and a series of other such moves, academic attainment went up.

In the last decade or more, she’s been applying a similar approach to public services. In Radical Help – a book that’s been published from Denmark to South Korea – she describes five “experiments” in different areas of public provision, touching on every stage of life: adolescence, work, healthcare, social care for the elderly and social work for so-called troubled families. These were pilot schemes, backed by local councils who had often grown so desperate at the status quo and so determined to improve the lives of their residents, they were ready to try anything.

Take Circle, a scheme aimed at the elderly ...

Let go of Adam's teat and read about ways to make cities sustainable.

But campaign finance monetization.

To Make Cities More Sustainable, Let Go of Tradition, by Richard Florida (City Lab)

“Things aren’t right in America today”: In his important new book on social innovation, Gabriel Metcalf—executive director of the urban policy think tank SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association) and a CityLab contributor—opens with this all-too-familiar sentiment. Rising inequality, deepening segregation, and increasingly unaffordable housing are just a few of the many problems currently plaguing the U.S. These issues are no more evident than in America’s dense, large urban communities, which boast some of the greatest technology and innovation in the world, but also some of the harshest economic and class divides.

To make things right, Metcalf argues in Democratic by Design: How Carsharing, Co-ops, and Community Land Trusts Are Reinventing America, we need to make more and better use of alternative institutions like cooperatives and community land trusts to help build more sustainable, socially responsible, and prosperous communities.