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; "The End Of Stop Lights?")
I recently read here about a couple of European towns that have removed all signage from their intersections… a kind of deregulation or intentional creation of traffic anarchy.
Can you imagine getting through Sacramento without any stoplights?
The result they have seen is that drivers have had to slow down and be more cautious about what they are doing because they have to account for what everyone else is doing. Bicycling and walking have increased and there have not been any major accidents.
What I find most interesting about the idea is that it forces human interaction and consideration by drivers. Cars are really an invasion of private space in the public realm of the street. In your car you don?t really need to interact with any people. You actually interact with the rules created by stoplights, yields, and stop signs instead of the people around you. By removing the rules, drivers and pedestrians are essentially negotiating new rules at each trip through the intersection.
I wonder if something like this would work here in our urban core. I certainly don?t have a lot of confidence in most drivers, but a well designed intersection could force them to a slow-enough speed that it might work. At least we could get more traffic circles!
Steve
1 response so far ↓
1 E // Oct 24, 2007 at 11:32 pm
I read a NY Times article a few years ago about this. There is a Dutch traffic engineer who basically threw up his hands and said, “Enough with arcane engineering practices — it’s time for common sense.” And it works there. But they have laws that require the bikes and peds to have the right of way in nearly all circumstances, and they design their transportation system to reflect that.
I can’t imagine anyone in any American town or city doing that. Americans are still very addicted to speed, convenience of the car, and unfortunately walking and biking and transit are an afterthought. We still design everything for cars in Sacramento. Despite all our talk about smart growth, sustainability, going green, etc., there has been very little meaningful progress towards creating a truly multi-modal transport system. There is too much fear that no one will come downtown, that if we don’t bend over backwards to make drivers happy by provided big wide one-way streets and huge half-empty parking lots and garages, we’ll lose out to Roseville or something.
I for one am sick of it, and I am a planner by trade. I’d love to see traffic signals, and many other forms of traffic engineering go away. But I’m not hopeful. Maybe in 30 years, when the cost of oil has risen so high that no normal person considers turning the key in the once-common contraption called the automobile. But for now, we’re still all junkies addicted to the car, and as long as we’re stuck in that, traditional methods traffic engineering like the signal or stop sign will prevail. They’re too afraid to give up their ability to order and control. They’ve tried roundabouts here, but even with those they thrown in stop signs so that the roundabouts are basically useless.
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