[wordup] Roads Gone Wild - More on Traffic Engineering

[Adam Shand]

The older I get the weirder the things I think are exciting. I can't 
believe I get all giggly about traffic engineering :-)

Adam.

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

Roads Gone Wild 
By Tom McNicholPage

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."

It's no surprise that the Dutch, a people renowned for social 
experimentation in practically every facet of life, have embraced new 
ideas in traffic management. But variations of Monderman's less-is-more 
approach to traffic 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 
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."

The common thread in the new approach to traffic engineering is a 
recognition that the way you build a road affects far more than the 
movement of vehicles. It determines how drivers behave on it, whether 
pedestrians feel safe to walk alongside it, what kinds of businesses 
and housing spring up along it. "A wide road with a lot of signs is 
telling a story," Monderman says. "It's saying, go ahead, don't worry, 
go as fast as you want, there's no need to pay attention to your 
surroundings. And that's a very dangerous message."

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.

  From the beginning, a central premise guiding American road design was 
that driving and walking were utterly incompatible modes of transport, 
and that the two should be segregated as much as possible.

  The planned suburban community of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 
as "a town for the motor age," took the segregation principle to its 
logical extreme. Radburn's key design element was the strict separation 
of vehicles and people; cars were afforded their own generously 
proportioned network, while pedestrians were tucked safely away in 
residential "super blocks," which often terminated in quiet cul de 
sacs. Parents could let kids walk to the local school without fearing 
that they might be mowed down in the street. Radburn quickly became a 
template for other communities in the US and Britain, and many of its 
underlying assumptions were written directly into traffic codes.

  The psychology of driver behavior was largely unknown. Traffic 
engineers viewed vehicle movement the same way a hydraulics engineer 
approaches water moving through a pipe - to increase the flow, all you 
have to do is make the pipe fatter. Roads became wider and more 
"forgiving" - roadside trees were cut down and other landscape elements 
removed in an effort to decrease fatalities. Road signs, rather than 
road architecture, became the chief way to enforce behavior. 
Pedestrians, meanwhile, were kept out of the traffic network entirely 
or limited to defined crossing points.

The strict segregation of cars and people turned out to have unintended 
consequences on towns and cities. Wide roads sliced through residential 
areas, dividing neighborhoods, discouraging pedestrian activity, and 
destroying the human scale of the urban environment.

The old ways of traffic engineering - build it bigger, wider, faster - 
aren't going to disappear overnight. But 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 bullshit. The truth is that 
most people are prisoners of their cars."

  Today some of the most car-oriented areas in the US are rethinking 
their approaches to traffic, mainly because they have little choice. 
"The old way doesn't work anymore," says Gary Toth, director of project 
planning and development for the New Jersey Department of 
Transportation. The 2004 Urban Mobility Report, published by the 
respected Texas Transportation Institute, shows that traffic congestion 
is growing across the nation in towns and cities of all sizes. The 
study's conclusion: It's only going to get worse.

Instead of widening congested highways, New Jersey's DOT is urging 
neighboring or contiguous towns to connect their secondary streets and 
add smaller centers of development, creating a series of linked 
minivillages with narrow roads, rather than wide, car-choked highways 
strewn with malls. "The cities that continue on their conventional path 
with traffic and land use will harm themselves, because people with a 
choice will leave," says Lockwood. "They'll go to places where the 
quality of life is better, where there's more human exchange, where the 
city isn't just designed for cars. The economy is going to follow the 
creative class, and they want to live in areas that have a sense of 
place. That's why these new ideas have to catch on. The folly of 
traditional traffic engineering is all around us."

Back in Holland, Monderman is fighting his own battle against the folly 
of traditional traffic engineering, one sign at a time. "Every road 
tells a story," Monderman says. "It's just that so many of our roads 
tell the story poorly, or tell the wrong story."

As the new approach to traffic begins to take hold in the US, the road 
ahead is unmarked and ambiguous. Hans Monderman couldn't be happier.

How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation

1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road - not signs and signals - 
dictates traffic flow.

2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the 
intersection is.

3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but 
also the pedestrian areas.

4. Do it in the road: Cafés extend to the edge of the street, further 
emphasizing the idea of shared space.

5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, 
rather than commonly ignored signs.

6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by 
texture and color.

Contributing editor Tom McNichol (mcnichol at pacbell.net) wrote about 
bowling in issue 12.09.