Wired: Roads Gone Wild

[shanek]

There's a very interesting article posted on Wired about modern-thinking traffic engineers using, not government rules, regulations, and traffic signs, but human psychology to manage traffic and make roads safer, and apparently they're having success all over the world. It actually makes sense if you think about it: the traffic signs etc. hail from a day when we didn't really know much about driver psychology. Now, we do, and we can design roads accordingly.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html

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.

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."

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."

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.

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 bulls**t. The truth is that most people are prisoners of their cars."

 

[MRC_Hans]

Uhh, that is not exactly new or sensational. I think they started to make highways go in curves through the landscape around 1960 here. The old-fashioned ruler-straigh roads had people speeding or falling asleep at the wheel (occasionally both ).

Roudabouts have been all the rage here for over a decade, much to the chagrin of some liberals btw. because they slow you down, and, curiously, because they are a cheap solution .

Hans

 

[AtheistArchon]

Roudabouts have been all the rage here for over a decade, much to the chagrin of some liberals btw. because they slow you down, and, curiously, because they are a cheap solution

- And as a liberal I can tell you, woo boy, there's nothing I hate more than driving slow around a perpetual curve and cheaper government spending.

- Um.

 

[BPSCG]

Oh, yeah? Try ripping out your signs here

Or here:

These two intersections are on the same stretch of Interstate 95, within a mile of each other.

Actually, I like this kind of approach. For years now, engineers and designers have struggled mightily to make driving more and more idiot-proof. The Law of Unintended Consequences then has kicked in heavily, as fewer and fewer idiots get killed each year, and more and more idiots survive to pass on their idiot genes.

Ripping out the signs requires people to actually pay attention to their driving, rather than the cell phone, the radio/CD player, the kids in the back seat. the scenery, the flaming wreck on the side of the road...

Of course, in the good ol' USA, the minute you rip out the signs, some chowderhead yapping on his cell while smacking his kid in the back seat is going to get into a horrifying crash and sue the state highway department for 1) not warning him that he was approaching a dangerous intersection and 2) not reminding him that yapping on the phone while driving is dangerous.

 

[Hutch]

I like traffic circles, but here in N. Alabama they built one in a rather out of the way location and people are having a fit, trying to figure out how to use it (down South, attempting to merge in traffic is considered a test of manhood) and wondering why the county didn't just build a "regular" intersection.

Take this guy to Cairo or Bombay and let him take away the signs there--oops, no one pays attention to them now, so no big deal.

 

[Checkmite]

Years and years ago they built a roundabout at the intersection of SR 301 and SR 303 in LaGrange here in Ohio. It works beautifully...it's about time some other engineers have started catching on.

On the other hand, I don't get this guy's opinion that "most" signs are dangerous. I'm thinking, here, of the signs that I see during my commute to work: Aside from the speed limit signs, there's "No Passing", "Hill", "Bridge Freezes Before Pavement", and a couple of intersection or s-curve diagram signs. How are these dangerous?

 

[Grammatron]

Uhh, that is not exactly new or sensational. I think they started to make highways go in curves through the landscape around 1960 here. The old-fashioned ruler-straigh roads had people speeding or falling asleep at the wheel (occasionally both ).

Roudabouts have been all the rage here for over a decade, much to the chagrin of some liberals btw. because they slow you down, and, curiously, because they are a cheap solution .

Hans

Wasn't Germany circa 1930 the first to build these types of highways?

And in fact Eisenhower failed to learn the lesson of the curves as were required at periodical distances on the highways, and built US highways straight

 

[Chaos]

Wasn't Germany circa 1930 the first to build these types of highways?

And in fact Eisenhower failed to learn the lesson of the curves as were required at periodical distances on the highways, and built US highways straight

Hitler started the large-scale construction of highways (for use as troop transport lane) after 1933. I don´t know if those were straight or curved, though.

 

[Ed]

Another truely amazing "coincidence". A couple of days ago they painted a line down the middle of a 1 mi. road leading to my house. If there are 50 cars a day there I'd be surprised. I thought that it was the stupidest thing I ever saw (they also did not get it quite down the center).

 

[c0rbin]

Society breaks down at the four-way stop.

 

[Rob Lister]

Society breaks down at the four-way stop.

Only because there are not enough of them. Nobody, including me, can remember the rules. Sure, I could look it up but I'd just forget by the time I actually needed the info and since nobody else knows the rules it doesn't matter anyway. Sure, the wreak would technically be the other car's fault but that assumes the cop that comes to the scene knows the rules.

We have a 4-way near my house which I have to negotiate about once a week. Eye-contact serves to determine right-of-way but it doesn't work well at night. Traffic circles are so much better but also expensive.

I like some of the ideas in Shane's link.

 

[c0rbin]

Precisely.

You can't remember the rules and therefore chaos (anarchy) ensures. Society breaks down

The traffic circle is simple, get on andget off where you need to without hitting anything or anyone.

 

[shanek]

Precisely.

You can't remember the rules and therefore chaos (anarchy) ensures. Society breaks down

The traffic circle is simple, get on andget off where you need to without hitting anything or anyone.

Well, that's the whole point of the article: you don't have to memorize a bunch of rules because the roads are set up to comply with human psychology.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Well, that's the whole point of the article: you don't have to memorize a bunch of rules because the roads are set up to comply with human psychology.

Which seems to be "me first, nobody else matters" in traffic situations. But then I used to live off a "service road", and daily would see people willing to risk death rather than yield to another driver.

 

[BPSCG]

Only because there are not enough of them. Nobody, including me, can remember the rules.

(...snip...)

We have a 4-way near my house which I have to negotiate about once a week. Eye-contact serves to determine right-of-way but it doesn't work well at night.

Oh, come on. The rule at a 4-way stop is simple. When two cars arrive at the same time, you must yield* to the car on your right.

If four cars arrive simultaneously, everyone sits there until they install a traffic signal. Seriously, if that happens, someone waves someone else on. In other words, when the rules fail, use your #$%^ head!

If there's a steady flow of traffic in all directions, you alternate: north- and south-bound go simultaneously, then east-and west-bound, then north-and south-bound again...

Is this really so difficult?

* [DERAIL]

The term "has the right-of-way" is evil and must be stopped. Nobody ever has the right-of-way, even an ambulance. The rule is that someone must yield the right-of-way. In other words, you give it - you don't take it.

Don't believe me? Drive around for a few hours and count how many signs you see that say "Take The Right of Way" vs. "Yield Right of Way."

[/DERAIL]

 

[BPSCG]

The traffic circle is simple, get on andget off where you need to without hitting anything or anyone.

I like traffic circles (or roundabouts), but they do have one problem. They presume the driver has the skills required to merge into traffic at relatively low speed. The number of "drivers" out there who have no more idea how to merge is probably about the same as the number who have no idea how to program their VCR's.

 

[punchdrunk]

I was driving on I-55 through Mississippi a few weeks ago. Crews were doing quite a bit of work on stretches of the road, and of course there were orange caution signs intermittenly posted. They also had those large, mobile, digital scoreboard-type signs out; at least two of them said nothing more than (after a couple of seconds of waiting for the sign to flash) "Drive Safe". To which I thought, I'd love to, if I wasn't busy reading these stupid signs that convey absolutely no meaningful information.

 

[roger]

If you want to see roads without signs, pavement markings, or lanes, but plenty of traffic circles, hie thee to Ecuador or Nepal. Take out some life insurance first, however, because you'll quite possibly need it.

I've done a fair amount of road travel in the named locations, and obviously I'm still alive. But I saw quite a few bad accidents, and had some truly frightening close calls. I can see how introducing circles with no markings to an area unaccostomed to them will make everybody slow down, but where they are a fact of life, it's pretty much a game of chicken. Somebody makes a break for it and dashes into the middle of traffic, causing everyone to jam on their brakes while a dozen vehicles follow the guy who jumped out. Now this flow has the right of way until someone the now stopped flow decides their live isn't so valuable after all and pushes their way out.