[Shadow_Group] No street signs, crosswalks, and accidents... How?

Thu Dec 9 17:00:51 PST 2004

No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer.
By Tom McNichol
Wired Magazine

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html?pg=1&topic=traffic

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can
put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve
warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not
only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of
failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done
his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a
problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says.
"To my mind, it's much better to remove things." 

Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer -
equal parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and
psychologist. The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads
that seem dangerous, and they'll be safer. 

Monderman and I are tooling around the rural two-lane roads of northern
Holland, where he works as a road designer. He wants to show me a
favorite intersection he designed. It's a busy junction that doesn't
contain a single traffic signal, road sign, or directional marker, an
approach that turns eight decades of traditional traffic thinking on its
head. 

Wearing a striped tie and crisp blue blazer with shiny gold buttons,
Monderman looks like the sort of stout, reliable fellow you'd see on a
package of pipe tobacco. He's worked as a civil engineer and traffic
specialist for more than 30 years and, for a time, ran his own driving
school. Droll and reserved, he's easy to underestimate - but his ideas
on road design, safety, and city planning are being adopted from
Scandinavia to the Sunshine State. 

Riding in his green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village
that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the
performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection.
It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a
day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago,
Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic
engineers to influence driver behavior - traffic lights, road markings,
and some pedestrian crossings - and in their place created a roundabout,
or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain:
signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the
right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs
separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car
zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the
intersection is utterly ambiguous - and that's the point. 

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes,
watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their
way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport.
Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of
crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made
through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around
the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene
gesture. "I love it!" Monderman says at last. "Pedestrians and cyclists
used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the
cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks
out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings
to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design
of the road."

It's no surprise that the Dutch, a people renowned for social
experimentation in practically every facet of life, have embraced new
ideas in traffic management. But variations of Monderman's less-is-more
approach to traffic engineering are spreading around the globe, showing
up in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the
US.

In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and
signals from its major intersection and cut the number of serious or
fatal accidents a year from three to zero. In England, towns in Suffolk
and Wiltshire have removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort
to slow traffic - experts call it "psychological traffic calming." A
dozen other towns in the UK are looking to do the same. A study of
center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research
Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no
center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent
decrease in the number of accidents.

In the US, traffic engineers are beginning to rethink the dictum that
the car is king and pedestrians are well advised to get the hell off the
road. In West Palm Beach, Florida, planners have redesigned several
major streets, removing traffic signals and turn lanes, narrowing the
roadbed, and bringing people and cars into much closer contact. The
result: slower traffic, fewer accidents, shorter trip times. "I think
the future of transportation in our cities is slowing down the roads,"
says Ian Lockwood, the transportation manager for West Palm Beach during
the project and now a transportation and design consultant. "When you
try to speed things up, the system tends to fail, and then you're stuck
with a design that moves traffic inefficiently and is hostile to
pedestrians and human exchange."

The common thread in the new approach to traffic engineering is a
recognition that the way you build a road affects far more than the
movement of vehicles. It determines how drivers behave on it, whether
pedestrians feel safe to walk alongside it, what kinds of businesses and
housing spring up along it. "A wide road with a lot of signs is telling
a story," Monderman says. "It's saying, go ahead, don't worry, go as
fast as you want, there's no need to pay attention to your surroundings.
And that's a very dangerous message."

We drive on to another project Monderman designed, this one in the
nearby village of Oosterwolde. What was once a conventional road
junction with traffic lights has been turned into something resembling a
public square that mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000
cars pass through the square each day, with no serious accidents since
the redesign in 1999. "To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design
such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you."

With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk
into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able
to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and
pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the
courage of his convictions. 

>From the beginning, a central premise guiding American road design was
that driving and walking were utterly incompatible modes of transport,
and that the two should be segregated as much as possible. 

The planned suburban community of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929
as "a town for the motor age," took the segregation principle to its
logical extreme. Radburn's key design element was the strict separation
of vehicles and people; cars were afforded their own generously
proportioned network, while pedestrians were tucked safely away in
residential "super blocks," which often terminated in quiet cul de sacs.
Parents could let kids walk to the local school without fearing that
they might be mowed down in the street. Radburn quickly became a
template for other communities in the US and Britain, and many of its
underlying assumptions were written directly into traffic codes. 

The psychology of driver behavior was largely unknown. Traffic engineers
viewed vehicle movement the same way a hydraulics engineer approaches
water moving through a pipe - to increase the flow, all you have to do
is make the pipe fatter. Roads became wider and more "forgiving" -
roadside trees were cut down and other landscape elements removed in an
effort to decrease fatalities. Road signs, rather than road
architecture, became the chief way to enforce behavior. Pedestrians,
meanwhile, were kept out of the traffic network entirely or limited to
defined crossing points.

The strict segregation of cars and people turned out to have unintended
consequences on towns and cities. Wide roads sliced through residential
areas, dividing neighborhoods, discouraging pedestrian activity, and
destroying the human scale of the urban environment.

The old ways of traffic engineering - build it bigger, wider, faster -
aren't going to disappear overnight. But one look at West Palm Beach
suggests an evolution is under way. When the city of 82,000 went ahead
with its plan to convert several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way
streets, traffic slowed so much that people felt it was safe to walk
there. The increase in pedestrian traffic attracted new shops and
apartment buildings. Property values along Clematis Street, one of the
town's main drags, have more than doubled since it was reconfigured. "In
West Palm, people were just fed up with the way things were, and
sometimes, that's what it takes," says Lockwood, the town's former
transportation manager. "What we really need is a complete paradigm
shift in traffic engineering and city planning to break away from the
conventional ideas that have got us in this mess. There's still this
notion that we should build big roads everywhere because the car
represents personal freedom. Well, that's bullshit. The truth is that
most people are prisoners of their cars." 

Today some of the most car-oriented areas in the US are rethinking their
approaches to traffic, mainly because they have little choice. "The old
way doesn't work anymore," says Gary Toth, director of project planning
and development for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. The
2004 Urban Mobility Report, published by the respected Texas
Transportation Institute, shows that traffic congestion is growing
across the nation in towns and cities of all sizes. The study's
conclusion: It's only going to get worse.

Instead of widening congested highways, New Jersey's DOT is urging
neighboring or contiguous towns to connect their secondary streets and
add smaller centers of development, creating a series of linked
minivillages with narrow roads, rather than wide, car-choked highways
strewn with malls. "The cities that continue on their conventional path
with traffic and land use will harm themselves, because people with a
choice will leave," says Lockwood. "They'll go to places where the
quality of life is better, where there's more human exchange, where the
city isn't just designed for cars. The economy is going to follow the
creative class, and they want to live in areas that have a sense of
place. That's why these new ideas have to catch on. The folly of
traditional traffic engineering is all around us."

Back in Holland, Monderman is fighting his own battle against the folly
of traditional traffic engineering, one sign at a time. "Every road
tells a story," Monderman says. "It's just that so many of our roads
tell the story poorly, or tell the wrong story."

As the new approach to traffic begins to take hold in the US, the road
ahead is unmarked and ambiguous. Hans Monderman couldn't be happier.

With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk
into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able
to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and
pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the
courage of his convictions. 

>From the beginning, a central premise guiding American road design was
that driving and walking were utterly incompatible modes of transport,
and that the two should be segregated as much as possible. 