Roads Gone Wild: No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents.

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic_pr.html>



Wired 12.12:

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


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.



How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation

1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road - not signs and signals -
dictates traffic flow.

2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the
intersection is.

 3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also
the pedestrian areas.

4. Do it in the road: Cafis extend to the edge of the street, further
emphasizing the idea of shared space.

5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, rather
than commonly ignored signs.

6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by
texture and color.

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'