Put a stop to stoplights the american conservative by Louis Postel

1/31/2016

Put a Stop to Stoplights | The American Conservative

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Put a Stop to Stoplights The shared space movement rewrites the rules of the road. By JONATHAN COPPAGE • March 31, 2015 Like

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In 1982, two small children were fatally struck by cars passing through the small Dutch village of Oudehaske. Concerned about the safety of their roads, the townspeople requested a traffic evaluation from their regional safety inspector, a man by the name of Hans Monderman, who would later be described by Wired as “the sort of stout, reliable fellow you’d see on a package of pipe tobacco.” Monderman faced a quandary. The road cutting through the village brought drivers accustomed to the speeds of empty highways into the heart of the town center. But he did not have the budget to install any of the traditional traffic engineer’s solutions to speeding, such as warning signs and speed bumps. So instead Monderman recommended that the village, which was also undergoing an aesthetic consultation at the time, try to look more “villagelike.” Rather than installing humps and bumps, warning signs and stoplights, instead of building guardrails around sidewalks or elevating the curbs, Monderman tore out the curbs altogether. He uprooted as many signs as he could legally get away with and replaced the standardized asphalt with red brick and slightly curved gray “gutters” that produced a road that looked five meters wide “but had all the possibilities of six.” Thus instead of traveling down a roadway that passed through a village, incoming drivers were thrust into a village, full stop. Under conventional trafficengineering guidelines, this was madness. Without signs, markings, and separations telling cars and villagers alike where to go and how to behave, people would be thrown into chaos that practically invited reckless driving and more accidents. Yet instead, Monderman was pleased to see, drivers recognized that their environment was different and ambiguous, and they slowed down to navigate with care, subtly negotiating their way through the space with eye contact and hand signals exchanged with those around them, whether in cars, on bikes, or on foot. Car speeds dropped by 40 percent, four times what conventional traffic control could promise, and the village was undeniably safer. This was the birth of what would come to be called “shared space,” a traffic and urban design movement that seeks to remove street barriers, markings, and signs in order to create environments where pedestrians, cars, and bikes all have equal claim to the street and navigate the space socially and spontaneously rather than relying on timed lights or instructional signs. Since Monderman’s work in Dutch villages like Oudehaske, shared space principles have been implemented in experiments across http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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Europe. And they’re worth Americans’ attention as well. ♦♦♦ The removal of signs, signals, and markings from a street inverts the logic that has governed our roadways for almost as long as automobiles have been mass produced, as doing so moves decision making from the engineer who designs the street back to the people who use it. The absence of speed limit signs means a driver must read his environment and modulate his speed appropriately. The absence of stop signs and stoplights means neither driver nor pedestrian is told when to go or when to stop; each must instead make those decisions spontaneously in response to conditions on and around the road. But the engineer has held the reins of decisionmaking tightly for the past century, for reasons both technological and ideological. After Henry Ford’s 1908 introduction of the Model T, automobiles suddenly became not just the playthings of the very wealthy but an affordable means of transportation for millions. As historian Clay McShane writes, “For the first time, cars were cheap and reliable enough for mass commuting,” flooding cities and suburbs alike with a new species of citizen of the road. Significantly larger than pedestrians, less predictable than streetcars, and ultimately much faster than either, automobiles were soon seen as reckless endangerments of society. With this potent new technology being introduced to necessarily inexperienced users, accidents were commonplace and fatalities, especially of children, quickly accumulated. University of Virginia historian Peter Norton estimates that “more than 210,000 were killed in traffic accidents in the period 19201929, a figure “three or four times the death toll of the previous decade.” Early 20thcentury cities already had a trusted source to turn to for answers to their problems, however: engineers. As Norton describes in Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, the 1910s and 1920s were a time of tremendous optimism in the power of scientific and technical solutions. The integration of mass waterworks and sewer systems had bought engineers particular favor in densely populated cities, while the business communities that paid for some of the first traffic engineers were enamored of Frederick Taylor’s ideas about “scientific management” in the workplace. As early traffic engineer A.G. Straetz wrote, “Traffic conditions on our streets and highways today greatly resemble the confusion and disorder which prevailed in the industrial production field twenty years ago.” Newly minted traffic engineers saw city streets as simply one more public utility in need of expert regulation, like the water systems civil engineers had just installed. Instead of negotiating the complex social environment of the street, traffic engineers sought to optimize the flows of traffic through the urban “pipes.” Commonlaw tradition had long dictated that all users were to have an equal claim to the street, but as Northeastern University’s Clay McShane explains, “at the urging of traffic engineers … city councils replaced this ancient rule with new ordinances that gave cars the right of way, except at intersections.” The auto industry and organizations like AAA assisted the engineers’ efforts by launching national campaigns to shift the blame for accidents away from the popular perception of reckless drivers and onto countrybumpkin pedestrians instead. Thus “jaywalking” was coined in advertisements and codified in law to brand pedestrians who dared step into the street as backwoods rubes, or “jays,” neither familiar http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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with nor fit for life in the big city. And so the street was gradually surrendered to the car. McShane notes one of the peculiar features of traffic engineering in the U.S. and indeed worldwide: its remarkable uniformity. The American system of governance is famously fragmented, after all, and nearly every municipality in every county in every state is empowered to make of its streets what it will. How, then, did their approaches all turn out almost exactly the same? McShane finds an answer in the nature of the trafficengineering profession: “A unified, national profession with common education, professional journals, conferences, and shared consultants would push American cities toward traffic uniformity, the local autonomy inherent in the federal system notwithstanding. A network of professionals controlled the network of traffic control.” According to Peter Norton, however, even the engineers were not destined to be entirely their own masters. The engineers’ greatest good is efficiency, which led them to a sympathy for streetcars and other modes of transit that could help alleviate pressure on the roads by more efficiently conducting people in and out of town. By 1923, however, the auto industry was seeing its formerly explosive sales growth start to slump, and fears arose that the market was “saturated.” To keep their market growing, automakers threw their weight behind a campaign to decry a shortage in urban “floor space” and urged reshaping and rebuilding streets to accommodate a greater supply of cars. “Induced demand” is a traffic engineering phenomenon whereby the creation of more road space simply encourages more road use. Norton suggests that America’s highways and wide roads were originally the product of Detroit inducing its own demand. With auto industry support, modernist planners’ fantastical ideas for remaking the American city were suddenly given the financial muscle to become possible and even mandatory. Highways would be brought into the heart of the city, people would be cordoned from the streets, and everything would be separated into its own gleaming sphere. Cronyist central planning bent wellmeaning engineers to its ambitions and shut out ordinary citizens. When European countries began encountering significant traffic congestion five to 10 years after the United States, they sent their own engineers to learn from the Americans and implemented similar standards, including the now ubiquitous traffic light and stop sign. “By 1938,” Norton relates, “the sociologist Louis Wirth could name ‘the clock and the traffic signal’ as the two symbols ‘of the basis of our social order in the urban world.’” ♦♦♦ On the night of the Academy Awards in 2006, journalist Tom Vanderbilt watched as Los Angeles Automatic Traffic Surveillance and Control engineer Kartik Patel attended to the city’s traffic system, conducting celebritypacked limousines through the oppressive Los Angeles congestion even as he also coordinated the movements of some of his fellow municipal engineers who were picketing in the limos’ paths as part of a labor dispute. Vanderbilt writes in his book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, “As Patel furiously taps on his keyboard, lengthening cycle times here, cancelling a leftturn phase there, it becomes hard to resist the idea that being a traffic engineer is a little like playing God. One man pushing one button affects not just one group of people but literally the whole city…” From the beginning, Peter Norton notes, “engineers seldom looked at traffic from the auto driver’s point of view,” no more than they did from that of a pedestrian or a streetcar passenger. Theirs was the “God http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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view,” surveying the entire system to maximize efficient flows. Hans Monderman was unusual, even for Europe, as a traffic engineer who saw through human eyes. A car enthusiast with a professed love of the Autobahn’s high speeds, Monderman ran his own driving school, which helped imbue him with an abiding understanding that cars are people, and people respond to the contexts they are given. “When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots,” he was fond of saying. And there were few parts of the received wisdom among traffic engineers that Monderman did not see as treating people like idiots: a sign warning of nearby cows posted on a road cutting through pastures, for example, or the panoply of barriers, safeguards, and redundancies built into roadways to accommodate the perceived inattentiveness of drivers. The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek described one of the fatal flaws of centralized planning as the “knowledge problem,” whereby the planner could never have as much information as the sum of each actor on the ground. Even an engineer with all the realtime data that Kartik Patel had at his fingertips on the night of the 2006 Academy Awards is information impoverished compared to the pedestrians and drivers who encounter each other at an intersection. A standard unsignaled roundabout can move traffic up to 65 percent faster than a stoplighted intersection because drivers do not waste time idling at the light, waiting for the computers to grant them permission to move. In sharedspace designs, traffic is always flowing, even if at cautious speeds, as people negotiate their way among themselves, using eye contact and hand signals to accomplish any needed coordination. The English town of Poynton recently provided one of the most successful demonstrations of this principle. With a population of just 13,000, Poynton was bisected by a busy road that transported 26,000 cars a day on their way to and from London. The intersection in the heart of the town was heavily engineered with conventional lights, signals, signs, and markings in an effort to coordinate the dense traffic. Yet the area surrounding the intersection was dying, as fully 16 of 32 nearby business locations closed. Poynton commissioned urban designer Ben HamiltonBaille to turn the intersection into a shared space, where cars were guided around subtly suggested roundabouts and pedestrians were free to cross. The returns to the town of Poynton were felt immediately, and today 15 of those 16 storefronts are now occupied and open for business. Despite the high traffic volumes, car speeds dropped and accidents fell, yet congestion did not increase because vehicles were able to continue moving at a constant, if slower, pace. By contrast, Tom Vanderbilt describes Los Angeles as “essentially a noncooperative network,” and says, “What traffic engineers do is to try to simulate, through technology and signs and laws, a cooperative system.” “Shared space” allows for a Hayekian solution to a century of problems arising from centralized traffic planning. ♦♦♦ The planning enthusiasm of the 1960s that produced urban renewal and the Great Society also introduced the concept of “forgiving highways.” Understanding that some accidents may be inevitable, safety engineers in the United States and elsewhere designed enormous buffer zones to reduce the severity of the consequences of running off the road. They built highways to anticipate the dumb driver and protect him from himself. Monderman did not mind that. But what irked him was when the forgiving highways treatment was extended into town—as it was in the U.S. to an extreme degree. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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The very features that make a street feel safe to drive down—wide, straight lanes with comfortable run off zones—encourage drivers to speed up and zone out, raising the risk of accidents due to a phenomenon called the “risk compensation effect.” As the famed Dutch engineer Joost Vahl once said, and Monderman eagerly repeated, “to make a street safe, you must first make it dangerous.” To demonstrate to visitors the safety brought about by his dangerous streets, Monderman was fond of walking into his redesigned intersections, backwards, with his eyes closed, allowing his visitor to observe the alert, civil drivers negotiating their paths around him. Monderman drew a distinction between the traffic world and the social world. The traffic world is the domain of the car, where people should speed along quickly and comfortably and unexpected surprises are best kept to a minimum. The social world, on the other hand, is the world of places, of people, where a driver is not expected to speed up and tune out but rather must negotiate his way through a place in conversation with both his environment and his fellow citizens. This distinction is what separated Monderman from the rest of his profession, according to Ben HamiltonBaille, the current standard bearer of the sharedspace movement since Monderman’s death in 2008. Monderman was engaged in placemaking more than traffic engineering, and HamiltonBaille observes that in placemaking there must be a clear conversation between the street and the buildings. The history of a place, the sorts of people that come out of its shops, whether a particular street is lined with retail stores or restaurants, all of these factors should be reflected in the street, and each street must be customized in accordance with its place. This stands in stark contrast to the standardization of roads according to the rules of conventional traffic engineering. When a road is totally divorced from its context, when an identical stretch of asphalt runs through a hundred towns across the country, “when you removed all the things that made people know where they were, what they were a part of, and when you changed it into a uniform world … then you have to explain things,” Monderman argued. A clutter of signs and directional arrows is an attempt at technocratic compensation for the destruction of place. HamiltonBaille notes that American roads and suburbs present particular challenges for efforts to share space, as most of them were built after the advent of the automobile age and thus have few historical or structural signifiers of place to begin with. The development of more humane traffic patterns in America is therefore a project requiring good buildings as well as good streets, so that both can participate in the conversation of place. Here the shared space movement intersects with the work of other urbandesign reformers: just as Hans Monderman sought to make village streets more “villagelike,” so the New Urbanist movement, for example, has spent the past 20 years pursuing the reintegration of American neighborhoods into the traditional models of development that preceded the great planning boom of the 20th century. “In the face of the countless technological and social disruptions accompanying mature industrialism,” Peter Norton writes, “Progressives substituted expert control for imperiled traditional or natural restraints.” The seeming collapse of the traditional street’s safety under the pressure of the automobile empowered traffic engineers in much the same way as the dissolution of traditional social safety nets rationalized the creation of the welfare state. A century later, however, conservatives have brought nearly every other component of the planning culture under scrutiny, as they press to reform and devolve our institutions to accommodate greater individual responsibility and restore traditional http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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communities. Our streets and built environment are no less in need of such attention and reform. Hans Monderman and the shared space movement suggest the way—without making us wait for the planners’ lights to change. Jonathan Coppage is an associate editor at The American Conservative. This article was supported by a grant from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Follow @joncoppage

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Hide 33 comments 33 Responses to Put a Stop to Stoplights Gian says:

March 31, 2015 at 4:31 am

Can’t work everywhere. Poor countries such as India and Africa have little or no signage but still have a lot of accidents.

Jim Josephson says:

March 31, 2015 at 6:20 am

What would the municipalities do at the end of the year with the remainder of the taxpayer largess if there where no street signage to buy? Excellent writeup.

Ken T says:

March 31, 2015 at 8:30 am

I can’t help noticing that the two examples described here are a Dutch village and a small English town of 13,000. So both are small, both are located in a European culture that has always embraced both public transportation and walkable neighborhoods rather than being devoted to car culture. So it is highly questionable how much applicability this has to the U.S. Try taking out the traffic lights in New York City and what you’ll get is complete gridlock combined with death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. If you want to see something like this here, you need to start by making it possible for people to be less dependent on their cars. Then when there are fewer cars on the road and more alternatives to driving, THEN you can start talking about “shared space”. Otherwise you are putting the cart before the horse.

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Grumpy realist says:

March 31, 2015 at 9:41 am

Um, if shared space is the beall and endall solution, why were there 210,000 deaths before traffic signals? Methinks the solution isn’t quite as simple as you make it.

Christopher G says:

March 31, 2015 at 9:47 am

Has the author traveled to India? http://youtu.be/RjrEQaG5jPM No one who has can take this idea seriously.

Greg Thompson says:

March 31, 2015 at 10:04 am

Er, have you actually studied the accident and fatality rates when roads in the U.S. didn’t have signs and signals?

philadelphialawyer says:

March 31, 2015 at 10:04 am

As a pedestrian, I, for one, do NOT want stop lights to be removed. In my extensive experience, pretty much ALL drivers stop at red lights, if only for self protection against other cars. Whereas many, many drivers, “roll” through Stop signs, just slowing down and never completely stopping. For a pedestrian, this is particularly important as you approach a “T” type intersection. If you are approaching from the right (from the perspective of a driver who is supposed to stop), you are in trouble. Because the driver often only looks to his left, which is the only place where cars that might be in his way, if he is making a right turn, can come from. Unless that driver makes eye contact with me, so that I know he sees me, I do not attempt to cross the intersection, even though I have the right of way. If a red light is there, instead, the driver stops and waits. Of course, “right on red” works against this, but we don’t have that where I live. And I don’t see in the article any real statistical support for the claim that putting a stop to stoplights generally will make the road safer for pedestrians.

ARM says:

March 31, 2015 at 11:52 am

As a frequent pedestrian I have to agree with those who say this probably wouldn’t work here. But I very much agree with the goal of doing things to make drivers more aware that pedestrians and cyclists exist. In the western city where I now live, every street looks like a highway and as a result drivers all drive accordingly. Cars frequently zip down my 3block residentialonly street at 35 or 40 mph or faster. The irony of stoplights is that they seem to make drivers believe that pedestrians have no right to be or cross anywhere except a stoplight – which is often not possible. Even marked crosswalks are treated as “Okay then, you may scuttle across here at your own peril. We won’t stop for you (even if you have your toddler with you), but at least you won’t be charged with jaywalking.” Downtown Toronto has a great system of encouraging what you’re describing: long sections of major streets in busy pedestrian neighborhoods have signage indicating that pedestrians may cross anywhere – they’re simply supposed to “Look and point” to indicate their intention to cross, motorists being obliged to stop for them. I think http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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the streetcars also contribute to making this safe, since they slow the general traffic down considerably.

Phil says:

March 31, 2015 at 2:10 pm

I think a lot of the commenters so far missed something in the reading. No one is advocating simply removing lights and signs and leaving everything else the same. Streets and intersections would need to be significantly changed so that removing lights and signs will work. I agree that the examples of success that are given are in small towns. The only way to see if it will scale is to try.

grumpy realist says:

March 31, 2015 at 2:37 pm

To quote from a wellknown book: “In Boston, broken stop lights does not mean people getting out of their cars and helpfully directing traffic. Broken stop lights give them the excuse to drive like the Chadian Army.”

Alan says:

March 31, 2015 at 4:14 pm

You can look at the street views of Oudehaske on Google here: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.957447,5.87244,3a,75y,270h,90t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s74w4do_sPQDyOJEm 1xw0g!2e0 Use the arrows to go up and down the street and turn around. You can see the effects of the planning described in the article, the narrowing of the highway, and how bicycles and cars flow together and also some gentle turns introduced as traffic calming features. Nice little village. I would live there.

I Don't Matter says:

March 31, 2015 at 5:23 pm

What many others said. This can only work within a specific culture. Anyone who travelled the world to any extent can attest to that.

philadelphialawyer says:

March 31, 2015 at 6:36 pm

“The irony of stoplights is that they seem to make drivers believe that pedestrians have no right to be or cross anywhere except a stoplight….” The way many State traffic codes are written, there is actually some truth in that. Of course, no driver has the “right” to intentionally run down a pedestrian who happens to be on the street, but pedestrians often don’t have any right to be on the street, except as crosswalks. Or, even if they are lawfully on the road, vehicles have the right of way.

Glaivester says:

March 31, 2015 at 9:04 pm

Monderman faced a quandary. The road cutting through the village brought drivers accustomed to the speeds of http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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empty highways into the heart of the town center. But he did not have the budget to install any of the traditional traffic engineer’s solutions to speeding, such as warning signs and speed bumps… Monderman tore out the curbs altogether. He uprooted as many signs as he could legally get away with and replaced the standardized asphalt with red brick and slightly curved gray “gutters” that produced a road that looked five meters wide “but had all the possibilities of six.” That’s cheaper? Or was the budget designed so the money could be spent for one but not the other?

Tonyandoc says:

April 1, 2015 at 1:17 pm

When we get autonomous and drive by wire cars all this will be solved. Cars will respond to wifi, sonic and radar and avoid infringements and pedestrians alike. Our main problem will be sleeping in and having our cars leave for work without us.

ARM says:

April 1, 2015 at 3:08 pm

“The way many State traffic codes are written, there is actually some truth in that. Of course, no driver has the “right” to intentionally run down a pedestrian who happens to be on the street, but pedestrians often don’t have any right to be on the street, except as crosswalks. Or, even if they are lawfully on the road, vehicles have the right of way.” Philadelphia Lawyer: I don’t see how that can be the case, or if it is, it shouldn’t be. In many places I go I’d have to walk literally miles out of the way just to cross the street. Come to think of it, I couldn’t legally walk off the block my house is on if you’re right, since there’s no light or marked crosswalk anywhere on it. In Canada, where I learned to drive, any corner where two sidewalks are cut off from each other (or even a visible footpath) is an “unmarked crosswalk” and drivers are obliged to let pedestrians cross – which makes eminent sense to me. It seems odd that the right of way would belong to the faster and deadlier traveler rather than the more vulnerable one.

Flossie says:

April 1, 2015 at 5:53 pm

This is going to be tried in my neighborhood in Chicago. City crews and the local utilities have been tearing up the street and replacing mains, etc., prior to eliminating sidewalks and all other car vs. pedestrian impediments. Should be interesting…

Paul K. says:

April 2, 2015 at 12:59 pm

Oh my good Lord! I can’t tell if this article a joke or not. The premise is a common one: less regulations imposed by “progressive” “planners” will produce a better result. The notion that it is cheaper to tear up a downtown area and repave it with bricks rather than install traffic lights is laughable. The sameness of US traffic regulations is considered to be bad. Should turn signals be optional? Would market http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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forces and self interest produce optimal usage? I have a sturdy rear bumper. I don’t need brake lights. I have a filtered climate control system. I don’t need emissions controls. The problem nowadays is that we tend to read opinions which correspond with ours so we can’t see when the writer is “playing” us by saying the things we accept on faith, which soothes us or kindles burning resentments. It’s much like the sympathetic vibrations from the soprano which shatter crystal.

philadelphialawyer says:

April 2, 2015 at 2:11 pm

ARM: You are right about “unmarked” or “implied” crosswalks. Most intersections that do not contain marked crosswalks are held to have implied ones, in which the pedestrian definitely has the right of way. Still, outside of the crosswalks, marked or otherwise, the pedestrian usually has either no right at all to be on the street, or has to yield the right of way to cars. In the USA, if there is no sidewalk, pedestrians are supposed to walk on the left shoulder of the road, and keep out of the traffic lanes entirely. And if they do cross the road outside of intersections, they are supposed to yield to vehicles. Moreover, some cities and towns, usually the more urban ones, add to the State codes and don’t allow crossing outside of intersections at all. The broader point being that while, again, a driver has no “right” to intentionally run down a pedestrian, wherever he may be, still, the law actually gives the right of way, in most cases, to what you rightly call the heavier and deadlier vehicle. I have seen court cases in which drivers have recovered for the damages done to their cars by their having to swerve off the road to avoid pedestrians who had strayed onto it.

jdmcn says:

April 2, 2015 at 3:51 pm

I live in Chicago. Last year there was a power outage along Western Avenue that caused the traffic lights to fail at a few major intersections. A trip of about 2 miles which would normally take 10 to 12 minutes took me about 45 minutes. At each intersection there was both gridlock and chaos as drivers were left to take turns allowing opposing traffic to cross before proceeding. To me it was the perfect equivalent of what happens when anarchy occurs.

Bill Byrne says:

April 2, 2015 at 4:25 pm

I don’t buy it. Well, obviously, there are particular cases where traffic lights are not the best solution. But that rural Dutch example is not typical at all of either urban or suburban driving conditions with high traffic volume. I can’t think of a single case in my area or on my way to work where it would make sense to get rid of a light. Contrary to the author’s claim, NJ originally had a policy of avoiding traffic lights as much as possible, by, for example, using circles instead. Today, 90% of those old circles have been removed and replaced by lights. Why? Not because of any “God’seye view” — that’s what produced the circles. Because, on the ground, the circles have contributed to so many accidents AND to so many traffic backups vs. lights. We still have a circle in our town and you take your life in your hands every time you negotiate it. Traffic lights were also avoided on 1920sera local highways by separating the two directions and having a crossover in the middle. We have one near us. We hate it — because of both the danger and the backups, and much http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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prefer to drive on the laterbuilt section of the highway, which has traffic lights instead. When my children go out walking in town, I direct them to cross at traffic lights as much as possible. Sure, on most streets drivers will readily and courteously stop for a pedestrian. But you are relying on the driver paying close attention. I am much more comfortable with crossing at lights where possible. I also fail to understand why this is antiplanner. It is simply choosing one form of planning over another.

Jim Houghton says:

April 2, 2015 at 5:03 pm

As a lifelong Democrat, I enjoy reading TAC because of the sane conservative voices here, voices that remind me of the good old days before the loonies took over the party. Not that I’ll ever forgive Republicans for Richard Nixon, but we’re all still family, so… But this article is something from the nutball libertarian world of impractical ideas. Sorry to see it here.

philadelphialawyer says:

April 2, 2015 at 7:32 pm

Bill Byrne totally nails it, in my opinion. Circles are the absolute worst. No one seems to know who has the right of way (the car in the circle does, by the way). And no one wants to ride in the interior lane of the circle, if it has two lanes, because it can be near impossible to get out! Which leads to all the traffic, that already inside the circle and that getting into it, concentrating on the outer lane. With attendant hesitation and uncertainty following. And pedestrians are much, much safer, again, in my extensive urban and suburban walking experience, with traffic lights than without them. Drivers, many of them, are just not looking for pedestrians, but only other cars. Often enough, the very existence of pedestrians in certain areas, even though the areas are clearly open to legal pedestrian traffic (eg, there is a sidewalk), seems to come as a big surprise to many drivers! But, with a traffic light, that is not a problem, because almost every driver stops for them, even if no cars are coming. Near where I currently live, there is a turn off from a busy road onto what amounts to a service road for a major highway, and to stay on the sidewalk of the busy road, a pedestrian has to cross the turn off. At the turnoff, which has a huge volume of traffic, there is a big, orange sign that says “Yield to Pedestrians.” But nowhere close to even half of the drivers do so. There is no oncoming vehicular traffic, and no red light, and so the drivers take it for granted that they can just whoosh on through! If there was a light there, even one of those push button operated lights, of course the drivers would stop when it turns red. But, as it is, a pedestrian either has to wait for the traffic to abate (which can take quite a long time), or play a game of “chicken” with the drivers, by bolding asserting his right of way and more or less demanding, by the force of his presence, that the drivers do in fact yield! And, of course, traffic lights most definitely are planned. It is not as if they just materialize on their own. Indeed, often it takes a pedestrian, or more than one, getting run over, to prompt the planners to replace a stop or yield sign with a stop light.

Kelly Smith says:

April 2, 2015 at 8:54 pm

I’m in favor of a whole cloth upgrade of our Traffic Signal Systems. Calling to report a malfunctioning light is almost impossible, as each jurisdiction’s maintenance department is extremely happy to pass the buck (or send callers to a voice mail that is, apparently, never checked). Meanwhile, cars idle away supertanker loads of gasoline, while sitting at intersections with zero cross traffic. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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SMART Lights would not only have the inductive loops, but would also return to blinking caution whenever daily traffic falls below a certain volume trend (between midnight and 5am, for example). Additionally, the default setting, in event of malfunction, would not be a timed cycling, but a proportional cycling which assigns green, proportionally, to whichever direction of travel is that intersection’s historically highvolume lanes. Whatever it takes to refrain from having a dozen motorists staring at a red light, while the completely empty lanes have that beautiful green orb glowing overhead. Local, ground level pollution is probably unreal in the vicinity of a malfunctioning traffic light. I would even settle for something like an online reporting system, where motorists could simply “click” on the broken light in question, perhaps tied to Google Maps. I don’t know, but SOMETHING is better than the wasteful goings on we currently have.

philadelphialawyer says:

April 3, 2015 at 12:04 am

I also think this, “This was the birth of what would come to be called ‘shared space,’ a traffic and urban design movement that seeks to remove street barriers, markings, and signs in order to create environments where pedestrians, cars, and bikes all have equal claim to the street and navigate the space socially and spontaneously rather than relying on timed lights or instructional signs.” at least in the context of suburban and urban America, is very, very dubious. As a pedestrian in America, I do not want, at all, to “share space” with cars or even bikes. I want most of the space I occupy, ie the sidewalks, to be off limits to vehicles. And when, inevitably, I do have to use the same space as vehicles use, mostly for crossing the street, I want clearly demarcated spatial and temporal indicators of the fact that the temporarily “shared” space is, in fact, reserved solely for pedestrians. When I cross a traffic lane, I want: (1) to have the right of way, (2) for the drivers and bikers to know that I have the right of way, and (3) for the drivers and bikers to be stopped in their tracks during my crossing. I prefer a marked crosswalk to an unmarked one. And a yield sign to no sign, a stop sign to a yield sign, and a red light to any sign. I don’t want ambiguity. I don’t want a “villagey feel” to try to substitute for a clear diktat telling the cars and bikes to stop. I don’t want spontaneous and social navigation based on a vague environmental sense. Conversely, when I am driving or biking, I, for my own sake as well as the safety of pedestrians, don’t want ambiguity either. I want to know where pedestrians are allowed to be, and that clear, well known rules govern their behavior. It doesn’t even matter to me if the rules seem to overly favor them, as long as they are clear. For example, in some New England towns, State and even Federal highways are also the “Main Street.” Many of them have now installed little stop signs at all the cross walks, and the law is that any pedestrian in the crosswalk has the right of way, and cars have to stop and let them cross. Fine. The space can be “shared,” but only if its spatial dimension is determined (we’re talking marked, not implied, crosswalks here), AND the timing is clear as well (as long as the ped is in the crosswalk, he has the right of way until he reaches the curb). http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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Wendy Willmore says:

April 3, 2015 at 10:30 am

This approach assumes that people have learned, and respect the laws of driving, and what they are intended to protect. I live in Africa, and I cannot count the number of accidents because people drive like they walk – any old way that they please at any possible speed. More space on the road is only more space to pass recklessly. The number of accidents is only rising.

ARM says:

April 4, 2015 at 11:14 am

Good points, Philadelphia Lawyer – I pretty much agree with all that about how I’d prefer to cross. My problem as a pedestrian, though, is that I find the vast majority of drivers assume they have universal rightof way, including at intersections with marked crosswalks, but even more so at unmarked ones and in parking lots (which seems bizarre, given that every single driver in a parking lot will soon be or recently was on foot). Onramps that cross sidewalks are terrifying too, as you mention. I don’t know what would fix this, but it does seem that part of the problem is drivers assuming stoplights are the only thing that counts. I also find most Americans I’ve discussed this with are completely unaware that they ought to yield to a pedestrian crossing from sidewalk to sidewalk at an intersection, or even in a marked crosswalk. They think pedestrians ought to wait until no cars are in sight at all, which is: (a) often not possible on a busyish street, and (b) less safe than crossing in front of a stopped car, given the possibility of cars appearing from driveways or cross streets, or simply speeding.

philadelphialawyer says:

April 4, 2015 at 5:18 pm

I agree ARM, USA drivers do act like they always have the right of way. And, yeah, nothing but a stop light actually slows them down. How do we change that? I don’t know, but I do know that I don’t want to be a guinea pig in the experiment!

rigs says:

April 9, 2015 at 7:06 pm

Many towns in the U.S. are increasingly doing much of this — minus the removal of street signs — in order to bring people back to their old downtowns.

Jim Brown says:

April 10, 2015 at 9:54 pm

Ever been to Saigon – sorry, Ho Chi Minh City? Minimal traffic signs or lights, maximum traffic. To cross the street you do roughly what Monderman did – walk slowly and steadily into the traffic, and let it flow around you. It seems to work.

Gene Callahan says:

April 16, 2015 at 9:51 pm

@grumpyrealist: “Um, if shared space is the beall and endall solution, why were there 210,000 deaths before traffic signals?” http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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Um: 1) Who said it was “the beall and endall solution”? No one? 2) The percapita fatality level was higher in 1970, decades after lights, than it was in the 20s. Pulling a number out of the thin blue air and comparing it to nothing at all is no way to make a case for anything!

philadelphialawyer says:

April 17, 2015 at 5:07 pm

“Ever been to Saigon – sorry, Ho Chi Minh City? Minimal traffic signs or lights, maximum traffic. To cross the street you do roughly what Monderman did – walk slowly and steadily into the traffic, and let it flow around you. It seems to work.” Try it on Queens Boulevard! I think maybe in Vietnam the traffic consists of bikes, pedestrians, pedalcabs and so on, with some cars mixed in. And maybe the streets are narrow too. In the USA, on the other hand, as on Queens Boulevard, there can be lane after lane of nothing but cars, busses and trucks, lots of them, moving fast. Attempts to simply walk into traffic, except at marked crosswalks backed with a red light, lead to death. At best, when there is a break, you can cross one lane (of the up to a dozen or more) at a time, and stand, precariously, on the border of that lane and the next one, and wait for another break. With the cars whizzing by and not stopping or even slowing down for you. Good luck with that! “The percapita fatality level was higher in 1970, decades after lights, than it was in the 20s.” Per capita fatality level? Why would that be a fair comparison, given that there were many, many more cars (both per capita and in absolute terms) in 1970 than in 1920. “Pulling a number out of the thin blue air and comparing it to nothing at all is no way to make a case for anything.” Indeed. Here is a real number: “Pedestrians. From 1975 to 1997, pedestrian fatality rates decreased 41%, from 4 per 100,000 population in 1975 to 2.3 in 1997 but still account for 13% of motorvehiclerelated deaths. Factors that may have reduced pedestrian fatalities include more and better sidewalks, pedestrian paths, playgrounds away from streets, oneway traffic flow, and restricted onstreet parking.” In other words, as cars and people were separated (sidewalks, pedestrian paths, playgrounds away from streets rather than kids playing in the streets or “shared space” generally), and as other explicit restrictions on drivers were imposed (rather than “social” conventions being “negotiated”), pedestrian safety increased. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4818a1.htm Instead of folks simply saying, “Well, with all your rules and regs and non shared space, there are still accidents, so there!,” how about comparing traffic safety stats over time, as the regs and rules were put in effect, and as cars and peds were separated?

Wafflebaby says:

April 24, 2015 at 12:08 am

Philadelphialawyer, what you say makes so much sense. Making the streets safe will have to be a result of the three Es: better education, engineering, and enforcement. I support governments and nonprofits teaching how to efficiently use roads. I support traffic and civil engineers applying research to help improve infrastructure. And I support motor officers who notice when motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians need a reminder to be courteous. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putastoptostoplights/

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