The way to break out of the pro-car, anti-car debate?

Why don't we do it in the road?
A new school of traffic design says we should get rid of stop signs and red
lights and let cars, bikes and people mingle together. It sounds insane, but
it works.

By Linda Baker
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ign/index.html

May 20, 2004 | It's rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui
and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the red
light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for a huge
mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left in front
of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds,
however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and
bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street,
unperturbed and fatality free.

In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. "There are no rules," as one local
told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000
bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter
forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the
few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another.
Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars
to cross the roads.

But here's the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I
didn't see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of
the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic
policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of
their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets. On the
contrary, the urban arterials are a communal mix of automobiles, cyclists,
pedestrians, and small businesses such as inner-tube repairmen that set up
shop directly in the right-of-way.

As the mother of two young children and an alternative-transportation
advocate, I've spent the past decade supporting the installation of ever
more traffic controls: crosswalks, traffic signals, speed bumps, and speed
limit signs in school zones. But I'd only been in Suzhou a few days before I
started thinking that maybe there's a method to the city's traffic
madness -- a logic that has nothing to do with the system of prohibition and
segregation that governs transportation policy in the United States.

As it turns out, I'm far from the first person to think along these lines.
In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is
becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland
Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It's called "second
generation" traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban
design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and --
of all subjects -- evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating
people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity
over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In
practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the
sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially,
between moving vehicles and children at play.

For the past 50 years, the American approach to traffic safety has been
dominated by the "triple E" paradigm: engineering, enforcement and
education. And yet, the idea of the street as a flexible community space is
a provocative one in the United States, precisely because other
"traditional" modes of transportation -- light rail, streetcars and
bicycles -- are making a comeback in cities across the country. The
shared-street concept is also intriguing for the way it challenges one of
the fundamental tenets of American urban planning: that to create safe
communities, you have to control them.

"One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears
chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having
your wits about you," says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben
Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. "The history of traffic
engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be chaos," he
says. "Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be productive."

A few years ago, Hamilton-Baillie spent several months researching traffic
and street design in northwest Europe, followed by a stint as a Loeb fellow
at Harvard. A former researcher at Sustrans, a sustainable-transportation
nonprofit agency, he has become a leading proponent of the shared-spaces and
second-generation approach, which he says meets the needs of automobiles
while returning streets to their historic function as civic gathering
places.

But the implications, especially in the United States, are nothing less than
radical. Reversing decades of conventional wisdom on traffic engineering,
Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety and vehicular
capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, such as stop signs
and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into lanes. Without any
clear right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to slow down to safer
speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and
decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.

"The more you post the evidence of legislative control, such as traffic
signs, the less the driver is trying to use his or her own senses," says
Hamilton-Baillie, noting he has a habit of walking randomly across roads --
much to his wife's consternation. "So the less you can advertise the
presence of the state in terms of authority, the more effective this
approach can be." This, of course, is the exact opposite of the "Triple E"
traffic-calming approach, which seeks to control the driver through the use
of speed bumps, photo radar, crosswalks and other engineering and
enforcement mechanisms.

The "self-reading street" has its roots in the Dutch "woonerf" design
principles that emerged in the 1970s. Blurring the boundary between street
and sidewalk, woonerfs combine innovative paving, landscaping and other
urban designs to allow for the integration of multiple functions in a single
street, so that pedestrians, cyclists and children playing share the road
with slow-moving cars. The pilot projects were so successful in fostering
better urban environments that the ideas spread rapidly to Belgium, France,
Denmark and Germany. In 1998, the British government adopted a "Home Zones"
initiative -- the woonerf equivalent -- as part of its national
transportation policy.

"What the early woonerf principles realized," says Hamilton-Baillie, "was
that there was a two-way interaction between people and traffic. It was a
vicious or, rather, a virtuous circle: The busier the streets are, the safer
they become. So once you drive people off the street, they become less
safe."

Contrast this approach with that of the United Kingdom and the United
States, where education campaigns from the 1960s onward were based on
maintaining a clear separation between the highway and the rest of the
public realm. Children were trained to modify their behavior and, under pain
of death, to stay out of the street. "But as soon as you emphasize
separation of functions, you have a more dangerous environment," says
Hamilton-Baillie. "Because then the driver sees that he or she has priority.
And the child who forgets for a moment and chases a ball across the street
is a child in the wrong place."

When it comes to reconfiguring streets as community spaces, ground zero is
once again Holland and Denmark, where planners are removing traffic lights
in some towns and cities, as well as white divider lines, sidewalks and
speed limits. Research has shown that fatality rates at busy intersections,
where two or three people were being killed every year, dropped to zero when
controls and boundaries were taken away. (This is food for thought among
alternative-transportation advocates in the United States, who extol
northern Europe as a model precisely because so much space in these
countries is dedicated to segregated pedestrian spaces and bike lanes.)

A photo of a reconstructed intersection, "the Brink," in the Dutch province
of Friesland, provides more design details. Until 1998, the Brink was a
standard asphalt intersection with traffic controls and segregated spaces.
Today, the entire area has been repaved with red bricks bordered by sections
of green railing. A raised piazza juts into the middle of the intersection,
but there are no sidewalks, road markings, or right-of-way signs. Every day,
4,500 cars share the space with cyclists and pedestrians who wander about
"the road" at will.

Hamilton-Baillie recalls visiting "the Brink" with Hans Mondermann of the
Friesland Regional Organization for Traffic Safety, a planner who has
redesigned several intersections with second-generation ideas in mind. "I
was amazed to hear him say, 'Have you ever seen so many traffic
violations?'" said Hamilton-Baillie. "'No rules, no rules,' he told me. 'You
have to think.'"

Subvert, don't attack, the dominant paradigm. Or, as David Engwicht, a
shared-spaces proponent in Brisbane, Australia, has written: "Implicit in
the whole notion of second-generation traffic calming is the idea that
significant social change only happens when we amplify the paradoxical
'submerged voice' as opposed to tearing down the 'dominant voice.' Engwicht,
a plenary speaker at the Walk 21 Cities for People Conference in Copenhagen
this June, argues that controlling a driver's natural propensity for speed
is futile. A more effective approach is to engage the driver by emphasizing
"uncertainty and intrigue" in the street environment -- for example,
planting a tree in the middle of the street instead of putting up a stop
sign.

"Standardized signage and use of standardized road markings should be
reduced to a minimum," Engwicht writes. "As they create predictability and
contain no intrigue. They also reinforce that a street belongs exclusively
to the motorists."

There's another step in the second-generation logic process. Safety analysts
have known for several decades that the maximum vehicle speed at which
pedestrians can escape severe injury upon impact is just under 20 miles per
hour. Research also suggests that an individual's ability to interact and
retain eye contact with other human beings diminishes rapidly at speeds
greater than 20 miles per hour. One theory behind this magic bullet, says
Hamilton-Baillie, is that 20 mph is the "maximum theoretical running speed"
for human beings. (Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has drawn similar
conclusions.) "This is of interest," he says, "because it suggests that our
physiology and psychology has evolved based around the potential maximum
impact on the speed of human beings."

The ramifications go beyond safety, says Hamilton-Baillie, to bear directly
on the interplay between speed, traffic controls and vehicle capacity.
Evidence from countries and cities that have introduced a design speed of 30
kilometers per hour (about 18.5 mph) -- as many of the European Union
nations are doing -- shows that slower speeds improve traffic flow and
reduce congestion.

"This surprises many people, although mathematically it's not surprising,"
Hamilton-Baillie says. "The reason for this is that your speed of journey,
the ability of traffic to move smoothly through the built environment,
depends on performance of your intersections, not on your speed of flow
between intersections." And intersections, he says, work much more
efficiently at lower speeds. "At 30 miles per hour, you frequently need
control systems like traffic signals, which themselves mean that the
intersection is not in use for significant periods of time. Whereas at
slower speeds vehicles can move much more closely together and drivers can
use eye contact to engage and make decisions. So you get much higher
capacity."

Combining slower speeds with a reduction in traffic controls, in other
words, may have more than public safety and shared-space benefits. It also
appears to profit the driver. (This is the logic behind the modern
roundabout, a redesigned version of the classic traffic circle that is
replacing signalized intersections in the United Kingdom and is gaining
acceptance among transportation officials in the United States).

"You can see this is the way to break out of the pro-car, anti-car debate,"
Hamilton-Baillie says. "Because the shared approach very much accepts the
car as a vital useful component in cities that will remain with us for some
generations to come."

Let's return to China for a minute. If traffic in the world's most populous
country provides a useful comparison and contrast, it's because
second-generation traffic calming isn't about anarchy; it's about studied
anarchy. In essence, Hamilton-Baillie is advocating for a new field: one
that blends traffic engineering with urban design. Or, as he titled an
upcoming paper: "Urban Design: Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" There's a
place for highways and roads dedicated solely to the movement of
automobiles, he says. Just not in the city, where streets constitute 70
percent of all public space.

"You have to have a completely different approach to the design of streets
in the broad urban realm," he says. "You have to make an absolutely clear
transition between those roads that are necessary, the state-controlled and
legislative world of the traffic environment, to the human-controlled,
culturally controlled world of the city, where you pick up your rules not
from what you're allowed to do, but from a much more subtle and complex
series of codes that are implicit through design and environment."

"If I walk into your living room, I do not need a sign that says, Do Not
Spit on the Floor," he explains. "Indeed, if there were such a sign, it
would probably be counterproductive."

Over the last few years, the shared-street concept has emigrated out of
mainland Europe to the United Kingdom. In addition to home zones, which are
cropping up in isolated residential developments, the city of Manchester is
currently reconfiguring a major section of its central core according to
shared-space principles. Hamilton-Baillie himself is working a project that
he says is the first in the country to bring together all the elements of
second-generation traffic calming: removing the road markings from a road
that runs past a primary school in the city of Bath. It's a project, he
says, that capitalizes on the area's "rich urban morphology" -- St. James
Square, the school and a historic church -- to "create a series of places
rather than a single highway."

In the United States, as one might expect, policymakers haven't exactly
embraced the virtues of ambiguity and uncertainty embodied in
second-generation principles. "Woonerfs are certainly being planned on
private property," says James Daisa, a project manager at Kimley-Horn
Associates and a national expert on pedestrian-friendly development. "But
the concept has yet to come to bear on public streets." City codes are part
of the problem, he says. The reluctance of traffic engineers is another.

Consider the case of Brookline, Mass., which installed a woonerf in front of
a Marriott Hotel last January. A patchwork of brick pavings, the
shared-space lacks big curbs, and the sidewalk and street are all at the
same level. But as reporter Anthony Flint noted in the Boston Globe, the
public works department botched the entire concept by painting white lines
and big right-turn arrows on the street, and placing
yellow-and-black-striped rectangles on the landscaped "bump-outs."

"It's clear that advocates and private developers aren't sufficient to bring
about a true woonerf," wrote Flint. "The traffic engineers need to be in the
room, and they need to understand the concept. A fact-finding trip to the
Netherlands may be in order."

For their part, many American traffic engineers say one critical ingredient
is missing for a system built around shared spaces to work in the United
States: a communal sensibility. "We live in a culture that gives so much
value to the individual and the expression of that is how we act in a car,"
says Robert Burchfield, a city traffic engineer in my home town of Portland,
Ore., which is nationally recognized for its preservation of public space
and its dedicated network of cycling lanes and pedestrian pathways. "I'm not
comfortable with less order when I can't get people to go below 50 or 60
miles per hour."

But this, of course, is precisely the point; redesign the street environment
as an active community space, and you equalize the power relationship
between cars and human beings "The real gain in urban quality does not come
from clawing back areas of the city from cars, as important as that is,"
said Hamilton-Baillie, who gave a talk at the Portland Department of
Transportation last fall. "But the next step is how you apply a broader
approach to those areas where you need cars and trucks, bicycles and shops,
and pedestrians and children's play, all those different functions to take
place in precious urban space."

Even if we're not ready to send our children merrily into the street, many
of us, intuitively, have already embraced the concepts behind
second-generation traffic calming. Like most other parents, I've drilled
into my kids the fact that traffic lights and signs work for cars, but don't
necessarily serve pedestrians who want to make it across the street in one
piece. "Look left, look right, look left again," I preach ad nauseum -- even
when the walk signal is green. And who can resist the symbolism associated
with recapturing the street for the (teeming) masses? It's not quite the
fall of the Berlin Wall, but the shared-space approach overturns the
landmarks of sedentary isolation -- everything from gated communities to
skyrocketing childhood obesity rates -- to celebrate the complexity and
contradictions of city life.

The absence of traffic controls means that people are out for themselves;
the trick is, they have to look out for everyone else as well.
Second-generation traffic design is a curious mix of selfishness and
altruism, of order amid chaos. And, after a fashion, it just might work.

--

A: Top-posters.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet?

"DRS" wrote in
:

Why don't we do it in the road?

Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are
headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds
that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a
collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes
formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and
hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and
fatality free.


The trouble is, those Chinese immigrate to Australia and try the same
thing.

Maybe that is why there are so many accidents...

one small detail you forgot to mention is that China has an annual roa
fatality figure of 100,000!!

That has more than doubled over the last 20 years as more and mor
chinese people can afford car


-

In aus.bicycle on Fri, 21 May 2004 22:19:02 GMT
wassupdawg wrote:
one small detail you forgot to mention is that China has an annual road
fatality figure of 100,000!!!


What's that as a percentage of population, and how does that percentage
compare with Australia?

Zebee

"Ron the Barbarian" Newsguy wrote in message
...
"DRS" wrote in
:

Why don't we do it in the road?

Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are
headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds
that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a
collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes
formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and
hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and
fatality free.


The trouble is, those Chinese immigrate to Australia and try the same
thing.

Maybe that is why there are so many accidents...

Completely missed the point. didn't you? Too many words for you to read and
you didn't get past the first paragraph.

Vossaka

Zebee Johnstone wrote:

What's that as a percentage of population, and how does that percentage
compare with Australia?

Not relevant really because so much of the chinese population can not
afford cars.


And what "mother of two"[1] doesn't realise is that it works only if
those chinese driving cars are courteous and those riding bicycles
instantly murder anyone driver who knocks down a bicycle rider {:-)


[1] I don't see it as relevant either, but it advances my theory that
having children can make you stupid. Alternatively, I wonder what she
was smoking at the time.

The whole article reminds me of the ramlbing of a stoned/drunk
introspective.

"Vossaka" wrote in
:


"Ron the Barbarian" Newsguy wrote in message
...
"DRS" wrote in
:

Why don't we do it in the road?

Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are
headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and
mopeds that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate
a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass
changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move
in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed
and fatality free.


The trouble is, those Chinese immigrate to Australia and try the same
thing.

Maybe that is why there are so many accidents...

Completely missed the point. didn't you? Too many words for you to
read and you didn't get past the first paragraph.

Vossaka

I did, the whole thing is a load of crap.

I have lived in 3 different Asian countries for a few years, so I know
what they are like, AND I have seen bad accidents as well.

As I said the story IS a LOAD of CRAP.

What the Chinese drive like here, is true.

Have you lived with them?

10 days in a city and not a single accident... crikees, that must be a
record yeah? I see massive pile up fatalities every day in Brisbane...

Charlie

"Charlie" wrote in message

10 days in a city and not a single accident... crikees, that must be a
record yeah? I see massive pile up fatalities every day in
Brisbane...

And according to the article that would be because...

--

A: Top-posters.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet?

DRS wrote:

"Charlie" wrote in message

10 days in a city and not a single accident... crikees, that must be a
record yeah? I see massive pile up fatalities every day in
Brisbane...

And according to the article that would be because...

*throws more dripping sarcasm back at first post*

Charlie