A mural by Cecilia Lueza graces the center of this St. Petersburg, Florida intersection. | Beth Reynolds

Expert advice for transforming your street corner On a chilly mid-December morning, an oversized, slow-moving vehicle rattled to a halt in front of my house. As I ran outside to see what all the racket was, a smiling man wearing a brightly colored vest emerged, cradling a large red octagon.
?Merry Christmas,? he said. And it was. After four years of asking the city to make my street safer, I finally had four-way stop signs installed on my corner.
Intersections are where streets physically come together, but they?re also symbolic crossroads for our communities, the places where we negotiate a shared space with our neighbors every day. On any given day I?m making multiple multimodal trips through my local intersection: driving in a car, pedaling on a bike, pushing a stroller, buying raspados from a sidewalk vendor, or helping a neighbor with groceries to the bus stop. Unfortunately, most U.S. intersections are also a terrifying part of daily life. Before our new stop signs were installed, cars flew past our house at gasp-inducing speeds just feet from where my young children puttered around on scooters. After witnessing a half-dozen crashes in the first two years we lived there, my neighbors put up signs by their curb warning people to drive more slowly?which were promptly knocked over by a driver that crashed into a parked car, shoving the vehicle past the signs ...