St. Paul’s busy Hamline-Midway neighborhood has tried calming traffic with signs before—picket signs at demonstrations to promote pedestrians’ rights along car-choked thoroughfares. And they’ve tried doing it with art before, painting intersections with bright designs. Now the neighborhood is getting 37 artist-designed signs with oddball imagery meant to make drivers slow down—if only to figure out why a sign that shows a dog says “CAT.”

It’s a project dreamed up by St. Paul artist Steven Woodward, the Pioneer Press reports, and paid for with $25,000 from the nonprofit Public Art St. Paul that was matched with arts funding from the state of Minnesota.

Woodward calls it “The Art of Traffic Calming,” describing it as “a real strange project” meant to quickly convey a simple message: People live here, so slow down.

Minneapolis has St. Paul beat by a matter of days when it comes to experiments using art to slow traffic. For most of this month the park board staff—for a $25,000 fee—let the Red Bull energy drink company put 25 eight-foot cubes showing artistic backlit photos of extreme sports on the bike lanes of the Stone Arch Bridge. Bicyclists commuting at speeds as fast as 30 miles per hour faced signs commanding them to slow to 5 miles per hour for an art exhibit. If they disregarded the sign they soon met the art head-on in the form of an eight-foot cube of glass and steel.

This was traffic calming with a vengeance: Bike-pedestrian crashes on adjoining sidewalks made news in a MnIndy video and a Minnesota Daily article, and rumors have it that a vandal biker was responsible for smashing one of the cubes. Several on a local biker message board suggested the city try blocking motor vehicle traffic with large cubes.