Iceland's Magic Crosswalk.

• Position: THE BIG PICTURE - Brief article

How do you get cars to slow down for pedestrians? This "floating" crosswalk seems to be doing the trick in one Icelandic town. Officials in Isafjordur (pronounced EES-uh-fyor-der) didn't want to install traditional speed bumps, which can harm car suspensions and increase air pollution when engines struggle to get over the raised asphalt at slow speeds. So they created this clever optical illusion instead. A local company was tapped to stencil and paint the precise geometric shapes required to achieve the effect. Iceland isn't the only place experimenting with alternatives to speed bumps: Cities in India, Canada, and France have painted images on roads of...