December 20, 2004
LIVE DANGEROUSLY:
Roads Gone Wild: No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer. (Tom McNichol, December 2004, Wired)
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."
Nothing makes a human being more dangerous than the illusion of safety. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 20, 2004 11:17 AM
Or you could use the New Jersey method: road signs with bad information.
Posted by: at December 20, 2004 12:28 PM"Nothing makes a human being more dangerous than the illusion of safety."
Heh. Try driving for half an hour in Pakistani rush hour traffic.
Posted by: Ali Choudhury at December 20, 2004 3:01 PMTraffic circles? Only in Holland. Has this clown ever been to the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysees during rush hour? Has he ever driven along Rte 46,3 or 18 in NJ at any time of day or night? The Tonnele Traffic Circle on Rt 1 & 9 in Jersey City? How about Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn? Columbus Circle in Manhattan?
There is definitely truth that some protections cause more problems than they avoid, air bags for example. But anybody who prefers traffic circles to stoplights lives in a fantasyland.
Posted by: Bart at December 20, 2004 3:24 PMMaryland was trying an expieriment in the late 1990s with "mini circles" which aren't as big as the ones built in the 1920s or 30s, but supposedly have enough leeway along the edges to allow entry and exits without the required stop signs or traffic lights a normal four-or-more-way intersection needs. However, I never heard how it turned out.
But remembering my dad's fears travering te dreaded Hawthone Circle north of New York City back in the 1960s, or the fun watching some of the demolition derby events at the traffic circles in Texas, or driving up U.S. 130 in New Jersey while waiting for some lunatic to come zooming though one of the yeild signs at the circle south of New Brunswick, I'll agree with Bart that unless someone proves otherwise, I'll consider the alleged safety of the circles to be more an idea of concept than of anything real-life experiences would indicate.
Posted by: John at December 20, 2004 3:43 PMI have spent a fair amount of time with roundabouts.
In general, they work pretty well, although it has nothing to do with the illusion of safety, which is no different than at an intersection controlled by stop signs all around.
Where they run into problems is when one particular direction seizes the right away with enough through traffic to never yield it.
If I remember correctly, the French approach roundabouts differently. Everywhere else, traffic on the roundabout has right of way. In France, traffic entering has the right of way, making the French version self-clogging.
I don't think I ever saw an accident at a roundabout in England that didn't involve a drunk plowing straight through.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at December 20, 2004 3:58 PMWhen I lived there in the 1980s, Montana had "uncontrolled intersections" in residential areas. These were, in effect, four-way yields. You weren't supposed to be going fast enough that you couldn't see opposing traffic and stop if necessary. Seemed to work, and I heard that there were no more collisions than in areas with stop signs every other block.
What's never noted about traffic circles is that they seem to take up a lot more room than a simple intersection with control lights.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at December 20, 2004 4:01 PMMr. Choudhury beat me to it, though I was going to offer the example of Delhi.
I reported on this earlier this year, in connection with a new town proposed on Maui.
It seems to me that narrower streets in residential neighborhoods (if there is plenty of offstreet parking) probably really are safer than boulevards where everybody bowls along at 50 mph. Until you put in traffic bumps.
I've been on roundabouts in Boston and want nothing more to do with them.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at December 20, 2004 7:01 PMThere are ways other than roundabouts to make roads seem less safe, or less conducive to driving fast.
Most drivers adjust their speed in accordance with perceived conditions, especially in the absence of traffic. A road that looks like it should bear fast traffic, but actually has some kind of hidden danger, is a disaster waiting to happen. They're called "overdesigned" roads, and they're nothing new.
Posted by: John Thacker at December 20, 2004 7:47 PM
How to take the streets back from the traffic engineers? Read www.bikewalk.org/trafficcontrol_backtobasics.doc
An abridged version is in www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n3/v27n3-brieflynoted.pdf