Photos courtesy of Lori Wilson Charles
Lori Wilson Charles is now known as “the stop-sign lady” in Winnetka Heights.
She and her daughter, Hattie, spent weeks knocking on their neighbors’ doors with a petition to create a four-way stop near their home, at 8th and Winnetka, last year.
Their work paid off when the stop signs were installed last week.
She says this was her “be the change” moment.
“My mom was like, ‘I can’t believe you did this,'” she says. “I’m not even like this.”
But she was tired of cars speeding through her neighborhood, and she knew many of her neighbors agreed.
So she figured out how to request a stop sign from the City of Dallas.
The city conducted a traffic study and found that 15% of cars were speeding, not enough to trigger a stop sign. Her application was declined, but Mayor Pro Tem Chad West suggested getting it done the hard way, by petitioning neighbors.
She needed 2/3 of homeowners within 900 feet of the intersection to sign.
Bringing a 2-year-old along helped in getting people to open their doors. But she also wrote notes to those who weren’t home or didn’t answer, asking them to contact her if they wanted to sign.
One weekend, Hattie reeled in about six signatures with a lemonade stand, and she earned enough cash to buy ice cream later that day.
“So it was like the best day of her life,” Charles says.
This was also around the time that Armando Leija, a professional landscaper, was killed by a speeding car while riding a lawnmower near Jefferson and Edgefield.
They wound up collecting 60 signatures, and the day the signs were installed, they celebrated.
Between the time she started her stop-sign quest, in February 2020, and the installation, her son, Oscar was born.
The ordeal identified some hangups in the system. Poor communication meant she was given the wrong form, which had to be worked out at the end. And she says she was never told exactly how many signatures she needed; she just collected as many as she could and crossed her fingers.
Since then, West has helped streamline the system and reduce the requirements. A new stop sign now requires 2/3 of property owners within 300 feet to sign, rather than the 900-foot radius.
The best part was proving to her daughter that work pays off, Charles says.
“Remember when we got those signatures?” Charles asked her daughter, who is now 3. “This is what came of it.”
Hattie’s response: “We did it! We’re a team!”
And they might be doing it again soon. Neighbors want another four-way stop at Winnetka and 9th, Charles says.
