www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html?tw=wn_tophead_6
How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation 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 war ning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not on ly annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of fa ilure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done h is job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a probl em with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says.
More Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer - equa l parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and psychologi st. The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem da ngerous, and they'll be safer. Monderman and I are tooling around the rural two-lane roads of northern H olland, where he works as a road designer. He wants to show me a favorit e intersection he designed. It's a busy junction that doesn't contain a single traffic signal, road sign, or directional marker, an approach tha t turns eight decades of traditional traffic thinking on its head. Wearing a striped tie and crisp blue blazer with shiny gold buttons, Mond erman looks like the sort of stout, reliable fellow you'd see on a packa ge of pipe tobacco. He's worked as a civil engineer and traffic speciali st for more than 30 years and, for a time, ran his own driving school. D roll and reserved, he's easy to underestimate - but his ideas on road de sign, safety, and city planning are being adopted from Scandinavia to th e 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 da y, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Mond erman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic enginee rs to influence driver behavior - traffic lights, road markings, and som e pedestrian crossings - and in their place created a roundabout, or tra ffic 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 pedes trian 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, w atching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their wa y through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicy clists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through flee ting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle w ith hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. "Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid th is place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the c yclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each ot her. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage tha t sort of behavior. It's no surprise that the Dutch, a people renowned for social experimenta tion in practically every facet of life, have embraced new ideas in traf fic management. But variations of Monderman's less-is-more approach to t raffic 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 sig nals 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 Wi ltshire have removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort to slo w traffic - experts call it "psychological traffic calming." A dozen oth er towns in the UK are looking to do the same. A study of center-line re moval in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no center line to g uide 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 ro ad. 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: slow er traffic, fewer accidents, shorter trip times. "I think the future of transportation in our cities is slowing down the roads," says Ian Lockwo od, the transportation manager for West Palm Beach during the project an d now a transportation and design consultant. "When you try to speed thi ngs up, the system tends to fail, and then you're stuck with a design th at moves traffic inefficiently and is hostile to pedestrians and human e xchange." The common thread in the new approach to traffic engineering is a recogni tion that the way you build a road affects far more than the movement of vehicles. It determines how drivers behave on it, whether pedestrians f eel safe to walk alongside it, what kinds of businesses and housing spri ng up along it. "A wide road with a lot of signs is telling a story," Mo nderman says. "It's saying, go ahead, don't worry, go as fast as you wan t, there's no need to pay attention to your surroundings. 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 squar e that mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000 cars pass thro ugh 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.
|
http://csua.com/feed/