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Life Without Traffic Signs
zuikaku writes, "Der Spiegel has an article titled European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs reporting that seven cities and regions in Europe are doing away with traffic signs, signals, painted lines, and even sidewalks. With the motto 'Unsafe is Safe,' the idea is that, when faced with an uncertain, unregulated situation, drivers will be naturally cautious and courteous. Then again, they may end up with streets jammed with pedestrians, bicyclists, and cars like some places in India and China." I can't see this idea getting traction in the U.S.
Yeah right, traffic signs and such were developed exactly because streets became (more) unsafe when horse carriages were replaced by automobiles.
OK there were road signs, traffic lights and the occaisional road marking, but most of the signs seemed to be twisted around so if you followed them you'd be going in the wrong direction, the traffic lights were largely ignored and road markings came and gone. However, despite it being a scary process for me it did seem to work, I never seen an accident there (although I was in constant fear that I'd cause one at first), traffic seemed to move well enough and the locals crossed the road with confidence (if you walked across the road confidently traffic would stop for you, but if you looked hesitant and waiting for traffic to slow down they'd just go right past you).
However, the article states that removing the rules creates an atmosphere or courtesy, certainly not in Napoli, they'd sound their horn if they thought you were being too hesitant at junctions or even if you were going a bit too slow.
They already drive on the wrong side of the road. Now, this?!
It's long been said that traffic, if devoid of speed limits, can self-regulate itself. It's why two four-lane highways, one with a 55 mph speed limit and one with a 65 mph speed limit will both see the same basic average speed of travel.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
In other news today, the UN has praised Europe for its recent decline in population growth rates. While many regions have had near-balanced birth/death rates, the latest figures show a sharp increase in the death rate, putting most of Europe in a population decline. Our over-populated world thanks you!
Demented But Determined.
I can get into this. No speed limits and no more one way streets. Sweet! Of course I'll have to start driving and armored car or a tank to stay alive.
Some have adopted the same strategy with respect to cyclists sharing the roads of inner cities with cars so cars would slow down instead of speeding when they've the whole road for themself. Cyclists as myself aklthough often feel -and I believe are- much safer on seperate bike lanes.
That would last about one day here in the US. The amount of lawsuits in one day of operation would be staggering.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"I can't see this idea getting traction in the U.S."
I'm sorry, but that was done away with too.
I actually think the German system is safer. There are a lot more rules to learn(but the drivers ed requirements are also a lot more stringent) but everything is very cut and dry once you learn them. There is no "yielding the right of way", either you have it or you don't. Unlike say in Pennsylvania where the law actually states that "nobody has the right away".
Germany also has roughly half the number of traffic fatalities per capita as the US, take that for what it is worth.
Monstar L
It's an idiotic idea. Anyone who has seen traffic in Belgium or France knows they don't even obey the signs that are there. In Brussels they have to have 2 cops on every major junction just to avoid gridlock due to vehicles following nose-to-tail blocking the perpendicular road when the lights change. And even then it's still total chaos.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Seriously though, I think that the most worry is caused where drivers are unsure of what to do. That's the whole point -- at a traffic light, you (supposedly) know what the other drivers are going to do. Stop at red, go at green, etc. No worrying about someone cutting you off, no need to make a dangerous left turn through six lanes of unregulated traffic, and so on.
In the US, I see much more risk-taking in these situations -- people cutting each other off, etc. The road rage and anger (and occasional killings) not only point to a deep-seated inner hatred of everyone but oneself, but also show the ubiquitous "me-first" attitude manifesting itself. Given this psychological state, could a plan like this ever work? I think not.
But I'm probably just as biased and cynical. :)
Our top story: With Europes decline in population, does this mean more room for US growth? At 11pm EST.
It's a four lane highway. That's why you get some pretty decent order. Now try comparing that to a situation where you four way intersection with two lanes on each side. It's going to be a disaster without some form of order and rules because everyone isn't pshyic and that's why some rules like right of way exist.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
There is no large city in the project. Their populations vary between 30000-120000. I seriously doubt it could work in larger cities. Ostende the only city I know in the list has already a significant part pedestrians only in its centre .
rj
Can't wait till the love of the chaos and unrivaled dynamism of unregulated markets spreads to the economic highways of Europe. The US lefties are always pointing to Europe as a model of a more socialist nirvana, but those over-taxed, over-regulated countries are competing with the East and Far East, and can't maintain. I bet a lot of Europe will be tilting more right in the economic sphere while preserving the social tolerance they have always had. This is a model for the future as apposed to US neocon-progressive flip-flop nightmare we have over here.
Notice the "everything will be covered in cobblestones" part. Bumpy roads as traffic control - that's a brutal solution to the problem. Coming up next, artificial potholes.
I lived in a small town in southern Illinois for a while: El Dorado. There were several intersections that had no street signs, and what happened is that we locals would treat the intersections as "Yields", while out-of-towners would simply blow through them, not realizing that just because they had no street signs, that didn't mean the other direction DID.
Of course, that raises a dilemma: with no signs, how do you alert people that they're entering a city/area with no signs?
And in today's litigious society, who's at fault in an accident?
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Before : when I am on bicycle, people ignore the stop on their own street, and despite me comming from their right, they speed up and nearly kill me nearing me on the 5 inches up to 1 yard (it happenned often on a specific intersection on my way that I go thru every day). After : what the hell will it change ? They were already breaking the law (the stop sign), breaking my right of passage (I am coming from the right). If they were "brethen" on the street they would respect my right of passage today. With such a change as getting right of sign it won't help idiot respect my right of being safe on the street any better.
The truth is that for some people being in some monster of metal and palstic of 800+ kg, with the protection on the sdie, air bag and whatnot, they do not care, especially against bicycle. Might make Right. SAme for circle crossing. They should leave me the priority while I am circling on it. 95% of the time they accelerate and apss me from inches rather than wait a few second I am passing their street. Brethen ? My ass.
As for the place where I used to live where there was no sign at all ? Well I cycled on the PEDESTRIAN sidewalk, because the street were deadly. I do not count the number of kids which were killed because some ass hole decided right-side priority don't apply to bicycle, 70mph in residential area is OK etc... Bottom line : it is not the overglut of sign which is a problem : this is the HUMAN NATURE : IF YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH IT, THEN YOU CAN DO IT.
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"You go first."
"No, you go first."
"No, you go first."
[Thinks] "Oh, he's letting me go."
[Thinks] "Oh, he's letting me go."
CRUNCH!
Or:
[Thinks] "I'm first to the junction, I have right of way. I'll pull out before that guy in the Vauxhall Vectra who's talking on his phone reaches it."
"'Old on, I'm at a junction, lemme just burn through-" CRUNCH! "Oh, fackin' 'ell! Some fackin' cahnt just pulled out right in front of me!"
You must think in Russian.
must... stay... awake...
Here in Dallas TX, we experience no traffic signs occasionally when stop lights go out. Especially awful with three lanes in one direction. Its instant 'blade runner' then.
So whats your mileage with no traffic signs?
Jim
What about just getting rid of those damn noisy, smelly dangerous cars that ruin life in city centers? That's guaranteed to be safer than either alternative in this article.
--
make install -not war
Cognitive psychology holds that people developed our current repertoire of cognitive abilities from selective pressure in the savannahs of Africa. If that holds true, then we have no natural cognitive toolset to deal with safe driving. Cars are extremely powerful, fast, dangerous machines, yet we have no instinctive fear of them like we do spiders or bears. Even someone who survived a horrible accident is afraid of *driving* or *riding* in a car, not crossing a busy street (unless they were hit by a car).
People just don't have the mental capability to understand the speed and power of a car. You can look both ways before you cross, yet still be totally unaware of a car coming around a turn at 30 miles per hour. Cars move too fast for people to properly cognate.
Furthermore, cars insulate the driver from physical damage, so you don't learn lessons from reckless behavior as quickly as you would if you were walking down the street. You can do a lot of damage to property and people in a car by driving recklessly before you hurt or kill yourself.
And there will be some young yahoo who will purposefully drive recklessly through these unmarked areas, for the sheer thrill of it. Without visible, unambiguous markings, how could a policeperson or public safety official bring this person before a court and charge them with reckless driving or reckless endangerment? Without signage and laws regarding that signage, it's more or less a matter of opinion.
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Even Carmageddon had road markings...
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Wired magazine had an article a couple years ago saying this exact same thing. I remember thinking at the time, "I hope this doesn't ever actually happen." Who'd've (I just invented a new contraction!) guessed it would?
h tml
Ah, found the article. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.
Just the other day there was a blackout near my place of business and at the end of the day. The traffic was awful (all the signals were dead) and tempers were not much better.
Private vehicles and motorcycles moved from right to left on the second Sunday of the month,
Commercial vehicles made the transition the next Sunday.
Traffic signs and signals are being moved north to south, east to west.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
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They dont just remove all rules and traffic lights, what they do is replacing it with roundabouts. This is why they get less crash, and the crashes are less severe. Not removing all rules.
The loss of revenue through traffic tickets alone is enough to make this unfeasible in the US, let alone any other big city across the globe.
If you're trying to compare the safety of the traffic systems, then a per capita figure is useless, since Americans spend a lot more time in cars than Europeans. You'd want to look at the number of accidents per unit of time spent on the road, or number of accidents per number of cars, or something like that.
to determine whose fault the accident is. Here in Massachusetts, no one pays any attention to traffic signs, traffic signals, or the painted lane markers anyway. I has to dodge someone driving halfway over in my lane just last night.
Safer, probably. Efficient or smart, I doubt it. So there's nothing to stop people from double or triple-parking? Nothing to stop them from just stopping in the middle of the road, running in to get groceries, getting a cup of coffee, and then coming back? You can just make a u-turn wherever you want? Block a driveway? Does no signs == no laws? This seems like a perfectly awful idea in any town with more than 1000 residents.
Best, they could mark it, would be unrecognizable, but attention demanding signs - just because "well recognizable" means less demanding...
We demand attention and care here, in Europe, nonetheless!\\
Servant of karma
Indeed, but I bet that's only because the morons that don't know how to drive are already dead... Maybe that's why the United States traffic system is so dangerous, it's too safe to where it protects the people who probably should die...
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-Weeble
But how will we ever find our way to "Toutes Directions" and "Autres Directions"? The locals only seem to want to direct tourists to some place called "Mangez LeMerde", which I've never heard of.
In Rome there were plenty of signs and signals everywhere (it was basically an american city for about a decade after WWII) but the locals don't pay much attention to the rules. The polizia are not allowed to pull drivers over, they can note your license and then send you a ticket.. but try to catch my plate number at 105kph.
Unike you, I saw a number of accidents last year in Italy (spent about 10 months in Rome), the worst of which almost always involved a motorinno (Scooter). Lack of laws there seems to create an anything goes atmosphere.. if you survived the trip - clearly you were driving well.
I saw one vespa dragged 30 feet under a bus. Not pretty.
-GiH
I live on an island that has only two traffic lights. Then again, the island only has one main road that goes around it. What's traffic, again?
This is the equivalent of having a weight problem and letting yourself go completely in the hope that it will all work out eventually. A very very bad idea.
What you need is simple and clear rules.
Here in NSW, Australia you have to travel at 40km/hr in a school zone but only during certain times. Our main highways even have school zones. It's a joke. If you're doing 41km/hr at 3:29pm you're speeding and can lose a quarter of your license, but at 3:31pm you're fine. (We have a demerit system. You have 12 points. Points you lose are lost for 3 years. If you reach zero you lose your licence. Speeding, even 1km/hr over the limit loses you 3 points). It's getting even more ridiculous. We have one speed zone being trialed that's 90km/hr in the wet and 100km/hr in the dry. There's a speed camera and the variable limit is posted only where the camera can nab you. Talk about a bunch of revenue raising horse shit. So now the driver has to know exactly what time of day it is (to the minute) and judge the weather before they know what their speed limit is. What's worse is that everyone speeds - except at the known speed cameras - and if you stick to the limit you make everyone around you angry (which isn't safe!!!)
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A few years ago I worked and lived in Prague, the Czech republic before it joined the European Union. I had to travel across the capital every day to work and was very unerved by their driving. One week I noticed that the traffic lights weren't working across the crossroads and there were no signs indicating so. I believe my route across the crossroads was considered the major route, the other less significant, so I like others just carried on through at 30 mph or thereabouts. A few days later driving home I saw a car stopped in the middle of the crossroads with the air bags deployed. This was inevitable. They'd left a crossroads in the city with no traffic lights and no warning signs. They didn't do it by mistake, they did it because it is the norm.
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Getting rid of traffic signs is a start (even though all those commuters whose driveways are now blocked by parking cars may disagree).
However, the truly free market approach to safer traffic is to get rid of air bags and safety belts and, instead, install a sharp metal spike in the center of every steering wheel.
The roads only need one sign, teenagers.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
According to wikipedia, german Autobahns are actually safer the US Interstates, even though there is no general speed limit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Safety
KILLED per 1 BILLION VehKm on Motorways:
Germany 3.8
US: 5.2
Traffic in Germany is highly regulated by rules, probably much more then in most other countries.
Being german myself, I actually must say that I personally prefer the style of driving in southern-european countries though. Many other countries let drivers rely on their instincts and common-sense much more the we do. It feels more natural to me operating a car that way, then stubbornly following rules.
Probably the most un-german place I've ever driven in was Albania - even the captial, Tirana - a place of 700k inhabitants is basically free of any sort of signs, roadmarks or traffic lights except for some key intersections. Takes quite a different approach to handling traffic and navigating, but I if it weren't for the terrible road conditions, I would actually say that I like it.
I once saw a study (forgot where it was, though), comparing some South-American city (Lima?) with western cities, which came to the conclusion that the more "aggressive" style of driving there would actually yield a higher throughput of traffic. I wonder if there's some truth there.
That's because in Europe, driving drunk isn't as cool. Which accounts for most all of our accidents in the US.
That you have to actually take a class to drive may help also, here in California a large fraction of drivers can't even read the signs, since they aren't in Spanish. Every trip to work is a thrill ride tho!
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
sounds like you haven't been to europe yet...
go have a look there, drive a car and let's see how much time you spend in one
and yes, I *have* been in the US, quite a bit of it in fact.
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As Cars Collide, Belgian Motorists Refuse to Yield(Subscription Required).
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As Cars Collide, Belgian Motorists Refuse to Yield
A Shortage of Stop Signs And Quirky Driving Rules Create Culture of Crashes
By MARY JACOBY
September 25, 2006; Page A1
BRUSSELS -- The intersection outside Isabelle de Bruyn's row house in a quiet residential neighborhood here is a typical Belgian crossroads. It has no stop signs. Now and then, cars collide outside her front door.
"The air bags explode. One car flipped over in the street. Part of one car ended up here," says Ms. de Bruyn, a real-estate agent, pointing to her front steps. Her brother-in-law, Christophe de Bruyn, adds: "In America, they have stop signs. I think that's a good idea for Belgium, too."
The suggestion isn't popular at the Belgian transport ministry. "We'd have to put signs at every crossroads," says spokeswoman Els Bruggeman. "We have lots of intersections."
But insurance companies seeking an easier way to sort out who's at fault in Belgium's frequent fender benders have lobbied for a solution. And so now the government is in the process of making changes to a traffic rule at the heart of Belgium's problems. It is known as priorité de droite, or "priority from the right."
The law evolved from a rule adopted nearly a century ago in neighboring France, intended to offer drivers a simple rule of thumb: Always yield to any vehicle coming from one's right unless a sign or other road marking instructs otherwise.
That was meant to modernize an even more unwieldy rule of the time: Right of way went to the driver of the highest social rank. Horse-drawn carriages were still in common use, and, after accidents, "it wasn't unusual for the passengers to get out of their carriages and compare their titles and ranks in the nobility," says Benoit Godart, a spokesman for the government-financed Belgian Road Safety Institute.
Even more confusing, a driver in Belgium who stops to look both ways at an intersection loses the legal right to proceed first. Such caution might seem prudent, given the lack of stop signs. But a driver who merely taps his brakes can find that his pause has sent a dangerous signal to other drivers: Any sign of hesitation often spurs other drivers to hit the gas in a race to get through the crossing first.
The result is a game of chicken at crossings, where to slow down is to "show weakness," says Belgian traffic court lawyer Virginie Delannoy. Neither driver wants to lose this traffic game, she says, adding: "And then, bam!"
To make matters worse, cars on many of the smallest side streets still qualify for priority over those on major thoroughfares -- so long as they are coming from the right. That forces drivers on many boulevards to slam on their brakes without warning, and some get rear-ended as a result. On certain roads, the rule is suspended, but the only indication of that is a small yield sign drivers often overlook.
Today, failing to yield is the cause of more than two-thirds of the accidents at unmarked Belgian intersections that result in bodily injury.
It contributes to Belgium's relatively high traffic fatality rate, analysts say. Last year, deaths in Belgium from driving accidents were 11.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in Paris.
Other countries have more stop signs and traffic lights. By comparison, deaths in the Netherlands were 4.6 per 100,000 inhabitants, 6.1 in Germany and 8.7 in France -- countries that border Belgium.
Although the U.S. has a higher number of fatalities in absolute numbers -- 14.5 per 100,000 inhabitants -- there are more cars on the street in the U.S., as a percentage of the population, than in Belgium. Americans also spend on average more time in their cars, traveling longer distances.
When the difference in the number of cars is accounted for, Belgium has
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Near where I live there's a nice digital sign which shows your speed and says "thank you" or "slow down". Yet to find out whether it has a "whoops!" message for when you plough into a pedestrian because you were watching the sign instead of the road.
ISTR some schemes in the UK that were trying to reduce signage - but these were clearly based on the clutter/distraction principle.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
A google search for "Ipswich road signs" turns up nothing about the town doing away with road signs; a relevant page on Suffolk county council's website says nothing about what would necessarily be headline news. The same is true of a similar search for Kensington. Not only that, but as I live and work in London, I think I'd have heard about it, yet I've heard nothing at all.
Without corroboration, I'm going to have to consider this bullshit.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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> There is no "yielding the right of way", either you have it or you don't.
Um, contrary to the UK and Ireland, there is a right of way in Continental Europe.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
well obviously Seinfeld isn't on over there or they'd remember the episode where Kramer sponsors his own highway and thinks he can do anything to it so he uses paint thinner to erase the lines and everyone certainly doesn't drive cautiously. More like "how luxurious!" *swerves back and forth* Seriously, people will just do whatever without signs, especially if they're drunk or on a cell phone.
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"Works in India."
Not so much. It's done that way sure, and India has a stupidly high rate of traffic fatalities.
The assertion of the proponents of this, that less traffic rules means more safety, is not supported by the evidence.
This would better be represented as 'Unfamiliar is safe'. If people are in a new situation, they'll naturally be more cautious. Once everyone gets used to no roadsigns as the standard, things will be no safer than before.
-Grey
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That's what I was thinking. Perhaps the success of this is because it is limited to several areas.
Most drivers know the rules of the road from all the other places and keep them in mind when encountering such a situation as these towns. But what happens when these become the norm and the protocols aren't there, and there is only so much "unsafe driving" I can take before I start to feel comfortable and hit the pedal.
Protocal is there for a reason.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to have them do away with all the speed limits in the US that are under 10mph of reality, just so the coppers can ticket you when they want..... but to swing to the other extreme makes no sense.
And imagine the mess when the courts are faced with accident where there was no clear protocol. Who is in the right? Who is in the wrong?
I think I'll need an armored car too.
I can't see this idea getting traction in the U.S.
The author obviously has never driven in the DC moetropolitan area.
--MAB
If this was to happen in the U.S. I know that a few of my friends would be liking it. The underground street racing crowd would love this.
Do you know what per capita means?
This article is about roundabouts, which is basically a wheel intersection where each incoming spoke or road yields to traffic already on the wheel in the middle. It's not that you don't have traffic signals, it's that you've reduced everything to a yield. Think of it as a nonblocking I/O where nobody gets an exclusive lock on the intersection. Unless that makes less sense, then ignore that analogy.
We have these all over in Carmel, Indiana, and they are rapidly being adopted in other parts of Central Indiana. Personally, I think they work pretty well. It is tons better than a four-way stop both in efficiency and safety. And certainly a ton cheaper to setup and maintain than a traffic light. Definitely safer, too. I've seen plenty of accidents at traffic lights and four way stops when people go when they're not supposed to. I haven't seen an accident or remnants of at a roundabout. Not that I don't think they do happen, but that they are infrequent enough I have not had the opportunity to see one.
I did see once someone start around the roundabout, stop, backup, then start going around it the wrong way. Remember: In the USA you are always going counter-clockwise on a roundabout. If you want to turn "left" you just go around counter-clockwise and get off on that road. I've also heard of someone that didn't turn onto the roundabout and went right through the middle into a rock sculture. He was lucky he just bottomed out his car instead of getting T-boned by cross traffic for running what would have previously been a stop sign.
actually the worst that you would get is a fine.
Methinks you don't quite know what per capita means.
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Can't work here. People NEED something to shoot at on friday night.
Your point is still half-valid in that people in the US tends to drive more and have more cars per capita than elsewhere, though.
Read the sentence again. I state that "either you have it or you don't" which would imply that it does exist.
In the US(certain states at any rate), nobody has the right of way, but in certain situations you have to yield it to someone else. It's really a dumb system.
Monstar L
by removing traffic signs, you're removing the heuristics drivers use to make their decisions easier. This sounds like a good thing, but if you know anything about psychology, you know that it is NOT AT ALL. People don't know how to behave without clear norms. They have to think EVERYTHING through, which slows down their reaction times and increases their error rates.
And in this case, error rates may be expressed in terms of human lives lost. Not good.
Here is what it is like in India with no signs/lights.
http://arklow.741.com/images/Trafficcam.wmv
While driving around between clients, I've often found myself wondering about traffic signs and signals and such, and why we need them or how they could be improved. Yeah, I was bored.
One thought I have is that the majority of our signs are horribly inefficient for communicating ideas. Most icons used on signs are poorly designed, have limited information, and often come way too late to do anything about it.
Another thought is that we often have too many signs. Thankfully, with color our brain can associate a priority with these signs. Red is very important (STOP), orange is a potential hazard, green is directional, blue is hotel/gas/food. The problem are all the other ones, including advertising, that distracts us and lowers the noise:signal ratio.
I'm convinced, though, that any attempt to improve the system would get shot down because of the funding it would take to replace/remove all these signs. They are not cheap, but they do get replaced every 10-or-so years.
-David
The idea of less signage is already being practiced in the U.S. to a small degree.
One example is in Huntington Beach, CA, where along Pacific Coast Highway, marked crosswalks were removed because it was found that pedestrians assumed they had the right of way and were struck while crossing to the beach. They did have the right of way, technically speaking, but tell that to the guy that you just stepped out in front of and mowed you down.
In that area, all intersections are unmarked crosswalks, so no worries about jay-walking there.
The end result is fewer automobile vs. pedestrian collisions, since the pedestrian is now much more cautious on average.
I live in the US. Near my house inside a residential area is an uncontrolled intersection (an intersection with no signs and no defined right-of-way). I always slow down when crossing it (the posted speed limit is 15 mph), but not everyone does. It's scary. When visibility is low, I avoid the intersection. I plan on petitioning the city to put up a pair of stop signs to make that intersection safer. For the small amount of money these towns will save, their residents will incur huge increases in insurance (auto and health), travel time and accidents, and stress (imagine being scared at every intersection), and decreases in tourism (tour books will tell visitors to avoid those places) and safety. This is absolutely the worst idea in civil engineering I've heard in a long time. Road signs are necessary to safe transportation. Absurd.
The Dutch have a more restrained version of this that works quite well, called the "woonerf." (It means "street for living.")
In heavily-trafficked areas where cars will always move slowly and multiple modes of transportation come together (bicyclists, pedestrians, mass transit, scooters, cars, etc.), it seems that it works better if they self-regulate. Woonerven came into being in The Netherlands in the '60s and '70s, and the idea is to have a common space shared by all of these types of transit. Obstacles are placed in the street (planters, trees, parking spaces, etc.) to prevent traffic from moving quickly. This also turns pedestrians into the primary users of the space, making vehicles the intruders. Cars seldom exceed 10mph in woonerven.
Holland and Denmark have converted 6,500 brief stretches of road into woonerven. Traffic fatality rates have dropped to nothing. Intersections were a few annual fatalities were routine haven't seen a single death. That's a) because automobile drivers cannot drive through quickly because they're so varying and b) because 20mph is the cap of speed at which pedestrians can avoid serious injury when being struck by a car.
Happily, 18.5mph is the speed at which urban traffic flows best, many studies have shown. Coincidentally, this is also a speed at which there's no need for traffic control systems.
We have woonerf-like traffic patterns (and self-regulating patterns, as in the article) throughout the world now. Look at rush hour on Paris' Avenue de la Grande Armee: it's got four lanes of traffic at noon on a Sunday, but come rush hour people up and decide that maybe six is better. Look at Beijing during rush hour -- hordes of bicyclists mingling with packed autos, scooters weaving through the chaos.
England's got them, too. They call them "home zones." They're in a few dozen places now. They can't be more than a third of a mile long, and can't be used by more than 100 vehicles per hour. More traffic means that it's just not a viable home zone.
For more on this see Linda Baker's 2004 article for Salon, Anthony Flint's 2004 Boston Globe article, and walkinginfo.org's page about woonerven.
What about the new Danish traffic signs?
It seems to me that Germany values freedom of speech less than any other modern country. But it does seem to be a polite oppression.
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It is not worth anything until you at least present statistics about the number of cars per capita in Germany and the US. And even then, it would be important to know how long the average commute is in both countries.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
From the wikipedia article someone linked (which lists a reputable looking source) Germany is slightly less safe than the us per billion vehicle km traveled (9.7 vs. 9.4). Specifically this is due to a higher fatality rate on Non-Motorways (12.4 vs. 10.7). Of course the two countries are so different (land area, climate, density and other such things) than any such broad comparisons make little, possible if you compared same sized cities it may be better.
Seriously, I know it wouldn't look very cool, but bumper-car-like bumpers for road cars might go a long way towards solving these sorts of problems. Given that no one would be driving very fast in the towns, the bumpers would absorb the damage in case there was a misunderstanding. They'd also be wonderful for parking. Since Belgium has a lot of small cars already, this seems like the logical next step. Of course, I don't know how to help cyclists and pedestrians, but let's solve one problem at a time.
I think you're right. Once you replace driver initiative with traffic-lights, you reduce the competancy of drivers, and make them feel like there's no danger.
I'm watching my city (Australia - we drive on the left) as it slowly replaces 'turn left at any time with care,' and 'right turn when safe' lanes with traffic lights at every opportunity. I think it breeds complacence in drivers, and will reduce their ability to deal with unexpected situations if there's not a light or sign to tell them what to do.
Reading this article reminded me of an instance where something pretty amazing happened one day. I live in Albany, NY, and one day I was driving home along Central Avenue, which is aptly named and is one of the busiest roads in the city, if not the busiest. It was around rush hour, there was heavy traffic, and for some reason, all of the traffic lights were out. Completely out, for a mile or two at least. But that wasn't the part that amazed me. What was amazing was that traffic was still flowing, people were people courteous and letting people turn on from side streets, and there was hardly even any holdup in traffic. Traffic moved right along and I was soon out of the area affected by the outage. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have traffic lights at all, but I think the people who are promoting this idea are not as dead-wrong as some might think. (Also, it's probably important to note that European cities use roundabouts a lot more than we do in America, which don't really need any signs)
>It's really a dumb system.
Can you give an example of both systems in practice? I just don't understand what it means to have an actual right of way, as opposed to what I have here in the US... CA in specific.
For example: Light turns green, I have the right of way, but cannot legally enter the intersection unless it is safe to do so. So, do I have right of way, or not? If I was in a country that had an iron-clad right of way rule, does that mean I should just enter the intersection assuming there will be no one else there?
Another example from traffic school: A and B approach the stop sign at the same time, but B is on the right, so B has right of way. B waves A through. The instructor said technically B could be arrested for impersonating an officer since they are directing traffic, and A can still be ticketed for not obeying the rules. How would it work otherwise?
The whole idea isn't that crazy. Afaik it's a well known fact that people in larger cars and cars with airbags feel safer and therefore drive less safe than people in smaller cars and cars without airbags.
:)
I like the idea. now let's see if it's working
Privacy is terrorism.
Germany also has roughly half the number of traffic fatalities per capita as the US, take that for what it is worth.
Given that MUCH fewer people in Germany own a car than in the US and those who do drive them shorter distances, I'd say that this statement either:
A) Proves nothing
B) Proves the opposite of what you intended
Life is too short to proofread.
I was terrified by the traffic signs and rules in California. I found the 4 way cross-roads with a stop sign on each entry particularly confusing. It seemed to work on the principle of "everyone knows when it's their turn to go". Here on the Gold Coast we have a lot of roundabouts, which are not a perfect solution, but are really very simple (1) traffic entering the roundabout gives way to all traffic on the roundabout, and (2) on a multi-lane roundabout, only exit from the first left if you entered in the left hand lane. Keep those 2 rules straight and it's near impossible for it to stuff up.
In general, the rule here is "whoever disturbs the flow of the traffic the most gives way", which seems simple enough. It's different in other states though. I can't see the idea of less signals and signs working in the USA though, as your society thrives on rules and regulations, and without them people will cause trouble asserting their "rights" and "freedoms" over other people. The other posters who have pointed out that politeness is a key to safe driving without signs are on the money too - and American's are not noted for their politeness in general.
"Unlike say in Pennsylvania where the law actually states that "nobody has the right away"."
Holy shit, PA's has an ENTIRE SECTION OF THEIR VEHICLE CODE expressedly defining "right of way," amongst other sections where right of way is covered.
Vehicle Code, Title 75, Part 3, Chapter 33 Rules of the Road in General, subchapter B "Right of Way" has 8 sections, 7 which are relevant to the average driver.
PA even has a whole section defining the rights and obligations of pedestrians (which do not have right of way generally).
Damn man. No wonder driving around here is a mix of timidity and agressiveness--people don't even know the damn basic traffic laws. Then again, that's probably less your fault than the crappy police and DMV system we have here; we've got traffic signs and controls everywhere, crappy driving, and crappy and even wrong police enforcement.
(Most "speed traps" in the state are not in residential areas where people speed but some main road route that's briefly in a rural area.)
(I saw a person blamed for an accident at a 4 way stop for being in the intersection when hit by a vehicle coming in later even though the law expressedly states no one enters the intersection unless safe to do so, and the "at fault" driver was hit in the side by the front of the "not at fault" vehicle.)
(I'm one of the few people that think the "rule" that you yield to the car to your right at an intersection is stupid and a poster for the unsafe is safe. The vehicle on your right often cannot see you clearly due to pillar, and you're going to let them go through first...instead of the car on the left, who has clear sight and upon leaving the intersection frees up on the intersection to the vehicle that can see less (the one on the right).)
-Limited or no visibility at driveways and alleys, where buildings and parked cars obstruct sight lines for both drivers and cyclists
-Narrow lanes that leave no room for steering errors, or to avoid litter, broken glass, and other obstacles
-Speed limits on straight, level pavement that require using a mountain-climbing "granny gear"
-Pedestrians, dogs, roller skaters and other unpredicable living things (all legal at this California web-cam location, but risky never the less)
-Cyclists must pass to the inside of turning traffic, going from the driver's blind spot straight into the car's path
-Utility poles, garbage cans, decorative planters, news rack, mail boxes, and other fixed objects to collide with (all banished to the sidewalk because they would endanger drivers surrounded by a ton of steel!)
-Maintenance? What maintenance?
It's ironic that in most US cities bicycles are forbidden on sidewalks. But overnight, the city council can order a painted stripe and some "bikeway" signs forcing cyclists onto the same dangerous strip of concrete they were banned from the day before. It's a meaningless political gesture ("See what a bike-friendly city we are!") that wastes money while doing nothing for cycling safety. Unless, perhaps, discouraging cyclists is the goal of the safety program.
I live in a very wealthy, gated community. There used to be just about no street signs apart from those naming roads, and 2 stop signs. Recently they've added many speed limit signs, and stop signs at every corner. Why? Is it the traffic? Not at all. Is it because there have been a lot of accidents? I don't even think there has been one. The reason for this is simple, there are a lot of parents who are afraid of their kids getting run over. There wasn't a problem before, that I knew of anyway. It's just parents are afraid. I'm sure you've all seen those "children at play" signs people buy and stick in the middle of streets. The thing I don't understand, if you're so afraid of your kid being run over, why do you let them play in the street? Not even that, HELP them do so instead of MAKING them travel 50 yards to the park to play?
This is coming from the country that invented and pioneered the use of traffic and speed cameras, and now has thousands of them placed along their roads.
On the other hand I am not so sure I like the line
"We're getting rid of the division between cars and pedestrians."
As a pedestrian I would like to keep and extend this division.
Ever been to China? Trust me, when you get back to the state, you start kissing your DMV handbook!!!
+ traffic
You want un-enforced traffic, then watch these.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=china
Life is not for the lazy.
As a former resident of PA, I have to agree with the parent. Pennsylvania most definitely has laws regarding right-of-way, they just aren't necessarily phrased that way. I mean, just about every written PA Driver's exam I've seen asks about right-of-way at an all-way stop (when two or more cars arrive at an intersection simultaneously, the rightmost has right-of-way). You also have to yield right-of-way to pedestrians in the road whether there is a crosswalk or not (the fact that they're jaywalking does not make it legal to run 'em down; when I was in PA a busdriver was almost prosecuted for manslaughter for hitting a jaywalker -- the only thing that spared him was eyewitness testimony that basically indicated the victim had stepped from the curve directly into the bus). And on and on...
The fact that someone could have driven around Pennsylvania believing there is no concept of right-of-way is actually kinda scary. There may be multitude of PA drivers who blatantly ignore the law regarding right-of-way, but they at least realize they're doing it.
February 5, 2007
In accordance with the new "Unsafe is Safe" paradigm shift, new initiatives are beginning utilization:
All violent criminals will be freed from jail. They will then be armed with assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades, and given classified national secrets. The police will have their weapons taken away, replaced with nerf nightsticks.
Industrial waste and sewage will be redirected into drinking water supplies.
Medicine, sunscreen, and nutritious food will be banned, smugglers will be put to death. On the other hand, previously illegal drugs will be given away for free.
All public areas will require people to smoke.
Mailmen will randomly delivery explosives instead of the right packages.
Seeing eye dogs will be required to be pit bulls.
Previously elected officials will now be chosen by the mafia.
Welcome to the 21st century!
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Reminds me of the old idea that if one would really want the roads to be safer they should demand outlawing seatbelts and installing sharp spikes on the driving wheel.
India or China? Look no further than Amsterdam! Really, if you've gotta drive a car there, you're fucked.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
From the article - "Strange as it may seem, the number of accidents has declined dramatically."
I wonder what percentage of that decrease comes from drivers avoiding the town because it's a nightmare to drive through it.
I agree, and to add to that, I think automatic gearboxes also lower the driving standard. I learnt in a manual, and drove one for a number of years, including a year doing a lot of miles for my job.
Recently, I spent a year driving an automatic. After a few months, I found my speed becoming more erratic, as I wasn't paying attention to it. Now I've been back in a manual for 3 months, my driving has improved to my normal standard.
I think this is caused by the fact that while driving a manual, you need to know how fast you're going and what gear you're in at all times. In an auto, that's not really necessary, you just think in terms of wanting to go faster or slower.
Here in Tony Blair's wonderful nanny state, you can't fucking move without some sign or jumped-up idiot in a uniform telling you what you can and can't do. This has been steadily getting worse over the years, and now it's at the point that sometimes as you're driving along, there's so many signs bombarding you with instructions that you don't have time to assimilate them properly. This is especially problematic if you're in a strange location, where simply finding your way around's hard enough, without also having to work out if you're allowed to drive on the inside lane at 4:30 on a Tuesday, and whether the 40MPH speed limit sign you passed thirty seconds ago is still in force, because here comes a speed camera and it would be just like the bastards to lower the limit yards before it. Next thing you know, you're in the back of a Land Rover which has just pulled up to drop the kids off at school, and to rub salt in the wounds, a traffic warden chasing the employee of the month award is writing up a parking ticket with your name on it.
Still, here comes Ken Livingstone to save us all with a £25 congestion charge for people driving gas-guzzling behemoths like, er, a Mondeo diesel estate. Take the Tube, you say, Ken? Certainly, but first can you explain to me why, if the congestion charge is subsidising improvements in public transport, you felt the need to jack prices by 50% in some cases? Is there anybody you wouldn't like to fleece?
It boils my blood, y'know.
Actually, if you get caught drunk-driving in Germany (above a 0.05 alcohol content) you *will* probably go to jail the first offence. Plus get an informal shit-kicking from the cops.
-b.
and let met tell you, it's great for adrenaline junkies like me.
here in California a large fraction of drivers can't even read the signs
I've been to Germany once and couldn't read German. Not that big of a deal because it's almost entirely pictograms, unlike the US and Australia where they have signs that say "You know, it might be a good idea if you happened to stop on this corner" (OK, just slightly exagerated). With pictograms: 1) Don't need to know the language 2) *Much* faster to see/interpret 3) Much less distracting.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's an unwritten rule in Pittsburgh that if there is a red light and it turns green: The first person turning left gets the right of way over the people going straight. Its a somewhat sane rule since by alleviating the guy turning, there will likely be more people going straight and the flow is maximized. Out of towners may get in an accident though, whether they know the rule or not because it takes some posturing.
God spoke to me.
Most accidents happen when one breaks the rules and the other don't get it fast enough. Or there's a disagreement of rules. Both disappear when there's no rules. There's also "I'm right and if there's a collision, I get no penalty"-aspect here.
When you do not know that you're "right", ie. you've no privileges, you either drive carefully or lose your driving license. Quite simple. Much better than about 83234 different rules you have now.
Works quite well, too. At least in relatively small towns, with just one or two main roads. As pointed elsewhere, in a city with grid structure, abolishing traffic lights wouldn't work.
If people aren't give rules to follow, then how will they be able to disobey them and get fined, thus generating revenue for the government!
If this idea is ever put forward in Australia, I predict that the government will can it due to "safety concerns".
Europeans drive around half as much as Americans, full circle. That is still a lot of driving.
Of course there are those who spend their entire lives behind the wheel in both regions, but as a whole, there are less of them in Europe. Higher density towns and much more mass transit do it.
After WW2, the US was the only country that didn't have to rebuild anything. We were the world's best supplier of oil and automobiles. And we had vast tract of unused or low-value land. The VA projects alone put out more than a million single-family homes a year into the car-necessary suburbs. More than half of us grew up in suburban communities where childhood was basically whatever you could do in your single-family house to amuse yourself until you got a Driver's License and were free to explore the town, because you sure as hell weren't going to walk through it.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
link. I don't know. what the h*** is going on :-D. :)
Maybe it would become clear if one saw it live, so I searched for it hoping what someone would have shot some video of it and posted it and indeed so, I found this.
It doesn't make it less scary.
'Germans believe in law and order' - that cliche holds a lot of truth. I read about this and could hardly believe that german counties are testing this out. I'm shure it will work though. Especially in the suburbs where we have 30km zones allready anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That statistic could be misleading. I think the better statistic would be # deaths anually per miles driven anually. European countries tend to have less sprawl than the US so they drive a lot less (plus fuel is heavily taxed). While this means they would tend to have a less chance of dying in an auto accident, it does not mean their roads are necessarily safer.
Here is a video of how it looks like without traffic signs. It's amazing.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fg9f93gpfbo
You do know that Europe has about the same size economy? And WE have free education (elem. - College) and free healthcare plus legally required five weeks paid vacation minimum?
In Dallas people already drive like there are no traffic signs, lines in the streets, or lights. Hell, I live on a one way street and people go both directions everyday.
We had a storm last month that knocked out power in patches all over the city, and took out the traffic lights on my street for a few days. Everyone went back to the rules of "first car to stop goes first" and "a tie goes to the car on the right" at those intersections. In the five years that I've been here, I've never seen traffic flow so smoothly. I don't think it would work well at all in a busier part of town, but I've been mulling over a request to have those lights removed for good.
A co-worker of mine in PA moved up from Georgia. He would curse our roads. He claimed that all we had done was "dug up all the old Roman roads an' paved 'em."
Yes, he was aware that there were not _actually_ any Romans in PA.
My commute did, in fact, consist of a one-lane tunnel where both directions had a yield. There were also 2 four-way stops, a bizarre intersection where the turning road had the right-of-way, and an intersection where no turns were allowed... crossing only. Weird one, that.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yeah, because Mexican signs look nothing like their American counterparts, and Americans who can't speak Spanish usually crash within 1 mile after crossing into Mexico. Granted, some signs don't look identical, but almost all of the important ones do, and it's a bit racist to assume they wouldn't attempt to learn what the others mean, just like you'd want to know what the signs meant in any foreign country you went to.
Also DUIs account for less than half of fatal accidents in the US, and 7% of total accidents. But maybe your definition of "most" is different from everybody else's.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Just one example, a Redmond code-slave working for an unnamed large software compay had to go pick up her three-year old from day care, where it normally it would take her about 10 minutes to drive. Well, thanks to all the people leaving work at the same time driving cars with single occupier, the traffic jam made her driving time 60 minutes. Well, that may not even be the worst case you can think of in the world, but it is pretty bad.
It just amazes me how fast and long we can travel by air, but once you hit the airport, your travelling time will take a big hit. When will we have a solution and what will that be? IMHO, public transportation that is WELL designed (routes that connect well and timely) is one solution.
ANOTHER bright idea is to allow code slaves to telecommute. But that may be too revolutionary for single brain celled organisms called bosses, I am afraid, since all they care is that the slaves sit in their offices during office hours, no matter what they may be doing there.
I think there is some confusion between how Europeans and Americans count the number of lanes in a "road." In the U.S., typically an "eight-lane highway" would have eight lanes total, in both directions -- so four on each side of the median. Three or four lanes in each direction, for six or eight lanes total, is pretty close to average for a suburban Interstate. In contrast, in Europe (at least English-speaking Europe), I've heard people talk about a "dual carriageway" as a road that has two lanes in each direction, or four lanes total. So this might be causing some confusion.
The number of roads in the U.S. that have more than six lanes in one direction are fairly small, relative to ones with that many total in both, and mostly occur only in large metropolitan areas (Atlanta and L.A. have some highways that are 7 or 8 lanes in each direction, I think -- and I'm sure there are others) or in interchanges. But if I heard someone say "six lane highway," I wouldn't immediately assume that they meant that many lanes in each direction. Six lanes would be a far more common configuration if it was referring to the combined lanes, so three lanes each.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The first time I was in Boston, I waited through three cycles of a light for a time when a) the crosswalk said "walk", and b) the crosswalk wasn't full of cars turning. I finally gave up did what I saw everyone else doing: crossing when the traffic allowed it regardless of the lights. That's just how things are done there.
I think there's a place for traffic lights, especially when there's such a steady flow of cars in one direction that cross traffic would never get a chance, but when you're in a downtown area with delivery trucks stopped and pedestrians all over, I can easily see the advantage of letting the driver watch the traffic rather than the signs.
And if you did have a sign (like "blind entrance on the right ahead"), it would be a lot more significant.
As a Brit who lives in Germany, I can't agree with you I'm afraid. I cycle and drive here in Berlin and find it to be considerably more dangerous than in the UK.
I think the main issues being that Germans, even little old ladies, never ever drive at the speed limit unless they know there is a camera around. The other far more terrifying thing is that drinking and driving is a normal every day occurrence. Germans think nothing of drinking a few (strong) beers and taking to the road (I've seen them drinking beer first thing in the morning in their car on their way to work).
These facts and other aspects of the German psyche mean that they often ignore or don't see traffic signs. They will often try and cut in front of pedestrians and cyclists if they feel they can get away with it.
It is deadly. Purely and simply. If I cycle anywhere for more than 20 mins or so on a road I have at least one near death experience. I think this traffic experiment is extremely foolish based on the behaviour I've seen here.
Here it's every man woman and teen for themselves. No one EVER yields, no one obeys any rules and red lights are just suggestions. People only have 2 driving speeds: 85mph on the highway and 17mph on every other road.
Anyway without signs how are they going to justify hiring eleventybillion cops to write traffic tickets?
Well, in many norhtern places, the street lines and things are obscured by snow most of winter - the time when driving is the most dangerous and people cope with that. Removing all lines and things just extend that period to the rest of the year.
The only problem I see is that removing the lines and signs make it difficult for traffic cops to issue tickets, which is a major cash cow everywhere, so most cities won't do it, for that reason alone.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Street signs in the US are international pictographs, and most of the city names in California are already in Spanish. There are a few exceptions, like having "Ped Xing" scrolled on the pavement, but most of them are only marginally in English, and of course parking restrictions are designed for revenue enhancement rather than safety.
Back when Pete Wilson was governor, as opposed to his other office as State Reptile, he decided that it wasn't safe for people to drive while speaking Spanish, and got the legislature to require people to have citizenship papers in order to drive. The post-9/11 immigrant bashing reinforced the politicians who wanted to keep this even though it wasn't working. The main effects of this haven't been to prevent immigrants from driving - it's meant that there's more business for forged identity papers, and it means that Mexican immigrants who can't get good fake papers don't bother getting licenses or insurance, they just drive without them - and the ones who would have had to go to traffic school to learn how to drive so they could get a license don't bother with that either.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This isn't in direct reply to TFA, however the open highway has some of the fewest accidents and yet the most moving violations. This is nuts. Compare the US highway system to the Autobahn. Speed limits may make the accidents that do happen less lethal, but more than anything they're there to generate revenue. It's a huge conflict of interest that local police stations get money from speeding tickets and not, say, domestic violence incidents.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I think it's that way in most of the US--you never 'have' the right of way, you just don't yield it.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Of course, if this were the case all the time instead of a novel and interesting experience, people would revert to not paying attention, but without blinky-lights to help them, and it'd be like driving in Boston with better freeways. But it was fun while it lasted.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
These commuters seem to be doing just fine
Actually I think it could work for NYC, if they put a roundabout at each intersection. The advantage of roundabouts is they're essentially self-arbitrating. They'd probably save millions in electricity too ;)
One radical idea suggests one good thing to eliminate would be parking signs, because on-street parking should be abolished, or heavily metered and only allowed at times of very low traffic.
One thing we don't realize is that free and cheap parking are a tremendous subsidy of the private automobile. Not only do cities provide free or cheap street parking to private cars, they also pass laws requiring anybody building buildings to provide "adequate" parking. New homes must have garages by law in many districts, new office buildings large parking structures. In most cases, the parking is free. In many neighbourhoods, the city grants local parking permits to residents to give them free parking while visitors jostle for more limited spaces.
Now if subsidizing the private automobile is what we want, then this makes sense. But if we think we have too much pollution and congestion it doesn't. If people paid the real cost of parking, they would drive less and use transit more. Parking, privately owned, would be reservable from your mobile device, and possibly paid for through it as well. No hunting for parking or blocking traffic to park.
And possibly less need for all the street signs and regulations this thread is about.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
In all seriousness, if this were implemented in a US city, this would be a real-life Death Race 2000. I mean, it's not far from that anyway, even *with* the traffic lights and signs. It's taken Philadelphia and its New Jersey suburbs decades to eliminate the area's traffic circles. Those circles were responsible for countless accidents. In addition, half the drivers treat a yellow traffic light as the signal to "floor it". The other half slam on the brakes. Does anyone actually believe this sort of behavior would improve by eliminating the lights and the signs? Sorry, no. What this hare-brained idea does is say "let's pretend people are really nice if given the chance" instead of the real-life behavior of "every man for himself". People are SOB's. Deal with it.
Implement this idea, and you'll end up with a lot of people ending up as road pizza. Besides, if you eliminate traffic citations (no stop signs or red lights to run), imagine how much income municipalities will loose! To hell with human life, think of the *money* that will be lost! Priorities, people, priorities.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg9f93gpfbo
I can hardly imagine that this sort of situation is going to be tolerated for long in Europe.
Indian co-workers often comment to me how much better the traffic system is in the USA and how they can actually get places in safety and on time....
Caution: Contents under pressure
Traffic accidents and fatalities will be rising to unprecedented new levels as millions of drivers try drive while looking down at their GPS units, trying to figure where to go/turn next.
Another wonderful example of doing the stupid thing for the right reason.
The last line of the article briefly mentions that "the model is being tested in the British capital's Kensington neighborhood".
More information on this is here: http://www.alwaystouchout.com/project/110
The numbers from a quick Google search say that the 2001 fatality rate per "Million Passenger Miles" was 0.59 for the Autobahn, vs. 0.81 in the United States.
We can always rely on our European friends to move backward to go forward. Just look how many times they rely on the UN when they need something done. They chide us for protecting our children's chilhood while they want to shove homosexuality right up their Fischer-Price world.
...and WHY DO WE CARE?
So yeah...removing the order to get more order...I'm sure this makes perfect sense to them.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
I've actually caught a couple of drunk or high drivers in the past six months. I came up behind them on the highway and noticed them weaving from side-to-side and their constantly varying, low speed. I called the police in the town we were approaching, described the car and its behavior, and stayed on the phone with the dispatcher and behind the car until the police cruiser found us, one time well into town. Both times the driver was arrested and the car towed. One time it was a car full of convicted felons with weapons and drugs in the car, which I found out on the scanner after I got home; that was a little scary.
In Germany, if you have a green light, it means, you can enter the intersection, unless there are obvious obstacles, like a traffic jam. If you noticed nothing unusual when entering the intersection, and another driver who had a red light crashed his car into yours, it was his fault and his insurance has to take the responsibility.
In Germany, there are no intersections having stop signs like this. If person A encounters a stop or yield sign at an intersection, person B will not have a stop or yield sign, so person A will have to wait until person B has passed the intersection.
If there is an intersection with no signs, person A has to yield to person B. If B waves A through, it's not a problem, however. Waving someone thru is explicitly allowed.
The first rule of the German driving rules is "cautiousness and mutual considerateness."
Hence, common sense is the most important rule.
In a recently constructed supermarket parking lot here in Pitt Meadows, I'm of the opinion that the designer got a "good deal" on stop signs. They have them in places where there is no cross traffic. They have them at a point where trucks sit in a loading zone maybe once or twice a week - and all the cars have to stop even though there is a gate that is down most of the time :(
Get rid of the signs I say!
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
See? That's what happens when you let Italy into the EU!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Sounds like a good way to honor Milton Friedman, he surely would have approved of this kind of idea. Not only should traffic rules be removed, there should be no speed limits on all roads and there should be no penalties for errant drivers of any kind. The worst case has to be studied to fully understand the effects of such a system.
In unrelated news, Ford has opened a Humvee dealership in several European cities.
...that DE eVOlution is real!
Especially in low or no density areas. I just got home and sped on the highway at 90-100 mph through a 45mph single-lane empty work zone (it's winter darn it) until at the end of the highway there was a radar alert on the K-band and I could slow down and got home without any trouble. I got a few tickets (5) in the last year and found the following out:
-If you (are rich enough to) get a lawyer, no traffic ticket ever goes on your record. I pay $25 for each ticket instead of the $125+ for the 15mph over limit
-Get a decent radar detector and you won't get caught again unless the cop is smart enough to use instant-on (and that only works when there is absolutely no-one on the road otherwise he'll give his location away from miles away)
-It's absolutely safe to speed as long as you know what you're doing. I found out it's safer for me to go faster than 55mph because at 55mph I get more easily distracted while at 75 I know I have to keep focused. Look at Europe, especially Germany or some locations in the US where they raised the speed limit to 65 and there is hardly any difference.
-If you get a ticket at ridiculous speed they throw it right out of court if you contest (I raced someone 120mph in a 55mph on an empty road) but since these cars are supposed to be limited around 110mph the judge couldn't allow the radar reading. Cops are usually alone and they don't have any print-out of what your speed was. Next to that the error rating of radar and laser guns is so big... PA radar guns clock rocks on the side of the road going 45mph.
I think the driver license test should be more rigourous though especially the practical test. It should include slip, spin, speed safety tests even minor mechanical tests like changing tires, safe jumpstarts and temporary fixes for when your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere like when your head gasket or alternator fails.
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Was that for the autobahn versus all U.S. roads, highways, and freeways? That may or may not be a valid comparison.
I'm continually intrigued by how often reports on traffic accidents and fatalities are invalid because they focus on fatalities per capita instead of fatalities per miles driven. The report you link to implies that the US is unsuccessful at reducing fatalies due to traffic policies, but I bet a much more likely reason is that Americans DRIVE a whole lot more than residents in other countries.
There was an article on MSN today rating fatality rates by different occupations. One of the safest "occupations" was "homemaker". Well, duh, by definition, homemakers don't commute, which is where most drivers spend the majority their time.
I live in place where many streets are not painted, corners are blind, and roads are narrow. Without structure people do whatever they want. It's amazing how just a small handful of cars can snarl traffic when their driving is unstructured. It's "safe," in the sense that nobody's going to die, but it sure makes for crappy traffic flow.
Most likely (see Chinatown in Houston) immigrants think that because they don't speak English that they can get away with breaking the rules, not that they don't understand the signs. Making excuses like "oh, they don't speak the language" won't help solve the problem, because it keeps non-adversarial people blaming the system, rather than the immigrant flagrantly ignoring the rules.
All those hours playing Frogger and Freeway were worth it!
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
They mention that in the article: drivers apparently ignore an average of 70% of the signs, their point is that the presence and ignoring of these signs make driving unsafe because of the confusion that ensues.
So instead of trying to coerce everyone into making the plan works, they let each do their plan. And apparently, it works wonders in Drachten.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Ha, I live in guatemala, sometimes the POLICE can't read the signs, and they are in spanish.
Chances are any disscution on Slashdot will degrade into a flamewar about ID/Christianity within 14 posts.
Yes police brutality sucks. OTOH, drunk drivers *should* have their asses stomped, especially in countries like Germany where there are alternative means of transport available. Actually, when I was driving with my family when I was 16 and some old drunk fuck decided to go diagonally on the Turnpike and ram into us, I punched the fucker in the face before the cops got there. (No charges were filed by either side, but it felt good to mete out some rough justice. And for the record, he wasn't that old, maybe 50...) I don't necessarily agree with strict blood alcohol limits, but you shouldn't drink so much that you can't control your car.
-b.
Might as well pass a legislation mandating removal of all safety features like safety glass, seat belts and ABS brakes. And, also abolish the driving test system and remove the minimal driving age. :)
You know, this seems like a stupid idea. Then again, if you've ever driven around Italy, the whole damn concept of driving in that seems like a stupid idea. Italian drivers turn a one way street into a 4 lane highway, drive busses up and down cliffside roads that seem like they shouldn't even have normal cars on them (while smoking!), and don't even seem to notice that there are road signs, much less heed them.
Surprisingly, in my entire time there, including a short stint in Rome, I only saw a single accident. A car hit a puppy. An ambulance showed up and the entire town shut down while everyone tried to console the owner. I think the puppy was okay, actually.
Contrast this with Atlanta, where there have been days where I've seen no less than a dozen separate accidents between the two exits on 75/85 that separate work from my house.
Game... blouses.
You do realize that U.S. traffic signs were designed in a time when literacy wasn't nearly as high as it is now, in fact, all U.S. traffic signs were designed, from the outset, so they can be understood by the illiterate. You don't need to know English to know that a red, octagonal sign is a stop sign. Nor do you need to know English to know you are on an interstate, considering that the sign is shaped and colored differently than state highways or local roads.
Numbers also are universally understood, a 4 is still written as 4 no matter if it its called "four" or "cuatro". This is the reason why all traffic signs in the U.S. look so different from each other to differentiate between different functions. Even the yellow, triangular, warning signs use icons rather than text. In my state, in order to get your license(after the written and driver's test), and to renew it afterward, you must identify signs WITHOUT the text, blank stop signs, blank wrong way signs, etc.
Even Speed limits aren't that much of a problem, however, because all American made cars used in America have speedometers that emphasize miles, but also list kilometers per hour as well. Basically, when in America, you match the big number with the MPH for the road you are on. When in a metric country, use the small numbers.
I'm contributing late to the discussion, but here goes anyway.
Drivers are users. Roads and signs are an interface. Traffic is a design problem.
The current way of handling traffic doesn't really work. It was inherited from the horse-and-buggy period -- or even earlier Roman times -- and hasn't been adapted properly to modern cities. Having hundreds of rules and posting detailed signs everywhere is the interface equivalent of a command line: quite functional once you know all the rules without having to think first, but confounding for new users or those confronted with a different (foreign) system.
A good computer interface is intuitive. It's graphical (symbolic) rather than textual, mistakes are difficult to make, and one can use it with no prior learning. Doing this requires clever, thoughtful design combined with insight and research on how users act.
From a design point of view, the North American grid-system of roads with lights and signs at every block is terrible. A well-designed road system *should* need very few signs. Roundabouts, merges, overpasses and other techniques, carefully tailored to the location, can keep the opportunity for accidents at a minimum *and* make the safest manner of driving the most obvious and intuitive -- without making drivers memorize a rulebook or take their eyes off the traffic to read signs. Many principles of human interaction, like "uncertainty results in caution" can be applied.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
It is easy to throw such accusation "in the air". Too bad i respect every stop sign, signalisation, right of passage. Funny how it is those car owner which most of the time rant about cyclist, who are more probably not respecting any right of passage on cyclist themselves.
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There _are_ differences.
Looking at the stop sign use where I live in US: low traffic, wide open roads and - stop signs everywhere - you need to stop, increasing vehicle wear, cussing at the idiocy - or.. eff-it. Pretty anal IMO.
Comparing to DE - stop signs are mostly put where it's really dangerous and makes sense to better stop and take a closer look.
Similar with double middle lines. In US - double lines en masse - can't pass. In DE - rarely double lines, only when it's really dangerous and, if there is no double line, there is no guarantee that it's a good place to pass.
Difference: In one country more responsibilty is given to the driver, on the other, decisions are made for the driver.
What could be the underlying reasons?
Maybe the sue-happiness in US: Uups, I didn't watch and had an accident and ah - there was no double line. Well, that's the real reason for my accident... sue them!
What is the alternative you're suggesting?
It'd be horribly difficult to retrofit existing cities to function this way, but I've always thought that all traffic should function like freeway traffic. Treat traffic flow like water flow, and roads like pipes. No two-way streets; you never have water flowing two ways through one pipe. You have two separate pipes running next to each other in opposite directions, and water from one pipe never has to cross through another pipe to continue somewhere else; it cross over or around it (like making a left-hand turn [or right-hand turn for the Brits out there]). This could be approximated with roundabouts; so that traffic can flow into the circle and then out again in any direction (allowing for straight-through traffic, right or left turns, or U-turns). Stop signs and lights are like valves; you want to use them as little as possible, so your traffic keeps flowing, never at a stop.
You'd really only need three rules: yield to traffic on your left when merging (standard freeway/roundabound behavior), keep to the left when travelling (so there's room for people to merge on), and yield the left to faster traffic (so people can pass on your left). Or reverse the sides if you like, it doesn't matter. Now that I think about it, that's basically the driving rules for big-rig truck drivers; keep to the center lanes unless entering or passing.
Eliminates the need for any signs at all besides directional arrows (indicating what direction traffic flows on that street). Just follow the arrows that point the direction you want to go until you get where you want to be, and try not to hit anybody else on the way.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Mods who modded this flaimbait really don't know what they're doing. I live in germany and it is exactly this way. Don't believe in the holocaust and express it publicly? You can go to prison. Say "heil hitler" in public? A fine, possibly prison.
It seems to most people a polite oppression since the opinions oppressed are those of a group who many people don't like
I would be REALLY afraid of this idea catching on.
The article mentions roundabouts. Roundabouts have been fashionable among traffic planners for the last decades, but a roundabout does not mean the same as no rules.
Dropping all signs and signals seems like a flawed idea to me, sudden changes are never too good. But, what I've seen working, dropping traffic lamps (not totally, but at places where it can be done, after careful investigation) and thus enforcing to stick to default traffic rules can be a good way to go. People become more wary and drive nicer, and traffic can also become more continuous. But, as I said, not everywhere, doing this requires quite a lot of careful consideration.
Hell, how many times have I seen that when lamps go out, or policemen begin to control the traffic, people just become schoolkids again, many of them have absolutely no clue what to do, where to look, who has precedence over who in a crossroad or in a roundabout. They should have more practice when not only relying on traffic lamps.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
and watch how "safe" and "courteous" our motorists are in winter and spring when the street marking is unseen or gone.
Signs, no signs, speed limits - nothing matters here. We're still devout Bakunin's descendants.
especially in countries like Germany where there are alternative means of transport available.
Unlike America, where there are other drinks available. Noone forces you to drink alcohol then get behind the wheel.
I am not a fan of American laws, but realize that while Germans might have half the accidents, I would bet anything that Americans easily drive twice as much as Germans per capita. Not only do Americans have on average longer commutes, but they are also far less likely to use public transportation. Hence, I would not read too deeply into accident statistics unless they are done per mile traveled, NOT per capita.
Interesting that some people comprehend and embrace this seeming contradiction when it applies to roads, but not when it applies to weapons (i.e., the public is safer when the public is armed).
In other news, Slashdot is doing a way with moderators. With the motto 'Unmoderated is moderated', the idea is that when faced with unmoderated posts, readers will naturally read all posts. Then again, they may end up with posts in other languages like Hindu and Chinese and not labeled as trolls.
You've gota be fucking kidding! What about speeds around corners? - I use these as a great measure of how faster i should be going. I usually go a little faster, but i use that as an indication of what is safe. If there where no signs, i'd probably wouldn't be able to tell its a tight corner until it was too late.
Sounds completely stupid to me.
Good luck!
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Drivers in some areas, like in Indonesia, tolerate higher uncertainty because they know the "driving culture". Thus traffic signs is not so important.
/ 11/driving-framework.html on the few last paragraphs about "driving culture" and http://nothing-about-everything.blogspot.com/2006/ 11/driving-tips.html for some tips when traffic signs is not clear enough.
People who have driven in Indonesia for a couple years will assimilate the "driving culture" in Indonesia. (S)he will be able to tell:
1. When a traffic sign is violate-able, when it will be strictly enforced. It's not a matter of whether there is a police or not. It's a matter of understanding the intention of police. This instinct is very useful especially in places where traffic signs contradicts each other.
2. Yeah, traffic signs do sometimes contradict each other in Indonesia.
3. When to yield and when to force your way, however the situation is.
4. How to act when there is no traffic signs.
See http://nothing-about-everything.blogspot.com/2006
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
...is in Swindon, UK. Bizarrely, it seems to work, although it's a little bit intimidating the first time you approach it.
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
...Might is Right! Faced with such a 'free' environment, I'd make sure to soup up my vehicle as a monster truck so as to intimidate fellow drivers into letting me pass...maybe the suggestion of firepower onboard would help too. No one will want to mess with THIS bad guy. I won't be breaking any rules anyway, as no rules even exist.
I think this is basically what happens to all unregulated systems eventually. They said, what, 'courtesy' will develop?!? Maybe for a few seconds. It will just take ONE opportunist to wreck the whole thing.
Hi,
You now retain your right of way even if you come to a complete stop.
Used to be that when you came to a complete stop, you lost your right of way... But it was too hard to prove you did not stop (or the other guy did stop)
Keep this in mind the next time you drive in Belgium.
I've been through 4 hurricanes in 3 years. Every time, we lose power and street lights are down. The very first hurricane people were very cautious. They drove at reasonable speeds, were courteous to pedestrians, and drove in a generally safe manner. That lasted about 24 hours. Since the streets were pretty clear of other drivers, there was a lot more racing going on. People were extremely selfish at intersections and would never let people from the low traffic roads through. Those driving more cautiously were honked at and the road rage came out even more. Basically, every dickhead on the road was twice as aggressive, and every cautious driver was twice as timid.
It may be a good idea to have a reduction in superfluous signs, but getting rid of all traffic laws is stupid. It will work for a very short while, until people are used to driving that way. Then after a few months or years, things will be the same (or worse) than before.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
my favorite part of that DOT.org page is the "No Parking" signs listed as "Reduced Speed Ahead"
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You have a very good point there. I heard a long radio interview last year with the inventor of this system, and he made this point quite strongly: traffic lights and signs actually distract people. Every sign you put up, every light you blink, takes a little of the driver's attention away from the actual traffic. Signs are symbolic, so they require the drivers to actively look for them, see them, interpret them, and apply them to the situation at hand: valuable milliseconds of attention that, if you encounter one sign every second, add up to a constant distraction.
Most signs symbolically assert states of affairs that the driver may need to be aware of: sharp turn ahead, pedestrians crossing, dangerous intersection, parking space, city centre to the left. It's much safer to convey this information naturally, in the design of the roads and the space around them, so drivers pick up the information automatically. Traffic engineers have become a lot better at doing this over the years, so many of the signs we see today are mostly reminders of what is already clear from the situation. Monderman takes it one step further and says: we shouldn't just redesign our traffic systems to turn most of the signs into superfluous reminders, we should also take the step of not putting these signs up in the first place.
At least that's how I remember the interview.
Here in Albania (yes, seriously, I'm posting from Albania) we don't generally have traffic signs, signals or anything else to indicate how traffic should behave, mostly because we are lucky enough to have roads. And let me tell you things are INSANE here on the road. People, rather than try to be more cautious due to the unknown, instead do whatever they can to move along faster because they have no direction other than to think about themselves first.
In the town I live in, we recently have painted lane divisions and installed some traffic signs. No one follows them even remotely. Right about here it is important to note that people are [supposed to be] taught traffic rules and to follow these indicators. The unfortunate lack of such things has bred the idea into people that they don't need to follow them.
As they are introduced and people become more accustomed to them (and the law is enforced more), this will change and better driving habits will develop. But without such regulations, things are not safe in the least.
The people who made this decision for these cities need to take a drive down here into Eastern Europe. Maybe then they will get a real idea of to what these utopian ideas really lead.
*thinks of all those times at parking lots without lines or signs where people drive on the left side of the road thinking they can drive anywhere and always almost hit me when I go to turn in because they're on the wrong side of the road*
yeah, it'll definitely make people drive better.
- Alex
It's called Boston.
$20 per day per vehicle on the street
Residents don't pay when their car spends the whole day in a parking spot they *own*.
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In China a traffic sign is a soldier with an automatic weapon pointed at you. Works pretty well. Until he goes on a tea break. Then chaos ensues.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
i am surprised to see this as news. In Holland we did the experiement in some towns. Not the large metropools but the small to average sized towns. The experiment was succesful.
The idea behind unsafe is safe works very well. When everything is regulated you don't need too think anymore. Just weatch the traffic lights and do your thing. It creates a false sense of safety. When the light jumps on green everybody step on the gas and races away without even looking left or right.
But without the signs and traffic lights people had to think fot themselfs. People didn't had that false feeling of safety and started too look out for themselfs. When you have too think about safety you are much more careful.
I drive the motorcycle and it can be very dangerus when people in cars don't look around and pay more attention to their mobiles/make up/breakfast then the road. Again, without trafficsigns people have too think for themselfs and that will never be a bad thing.
Really? In my state, though I had to identify the signs to get my license, I haven't had to do so since. And the last time I took a written driver's test, they still had "dinosaur crossing" signs.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
>The other posters who have pointed out that politeness is a key
;)
>to safe driving without signs are on the money too - and American's
>are not noted for their politeness in general.
I guess if you only visit our enlightened teeming population centers, you might think that. Out here in Jesus-land, folks are right friendly
Not to mention Pittsburgh, where for some bizarre reason people making left hand turns at a light have the (unofficial) right of way of someone going straight. In case you haven't heard of the expression, its called a "Pittsburgh Left".
In certain cities like Rome or Paris, there won't be much impact. Traffic laws are widely ignored, anyway.
It's true that the Italians, who are used to fairly unregulated traffic, are more attentive drivers than many other nations; but this approach would work only in countries where self-discipline, respect for your neighbor and patience are common traits, i.e. only in Northern Europe. As an Israeli, I dread to think what the road would look like if such an arrangement was in place (in Israel, there are no unregulated left turns at street lights, and no right turn on red anywhere. Still, accidents are all too common).
I actually don't much care about the traffic in Manhattan... I don't have a car :)
The only time traffic impacts me is when the buses are slowed down, and that could be solved by putting in REAL bus lanes. Today, it means taking the subway if you are going in the same direction as everyone else. Bicycling is a little bit suicidal... I've tried it a few times since moving here, and I just don't have the stomach for it. Even the buses try to run you off of the road!
I really don't care if it becomes easier or harder for cars to drive in Manhattan - let them work it out for themselves, so long as their solution does not negatively impact public transit and does not involve some big expensive highway project through town.
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Example: There is nothing you can do to make my bedroom much more crowded, smelly, or dangerous to walk across.
Of course, robustness is not always to ultimate goal...
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with the proviso that about one of five drivers will honk if blocked. At night, neither cars nor motorcycles turn on their lights in general.
This appears chaotic but works extremely well. We saw only one accident in a week's time, and that involved very little damage (car bumped a truck on the side), although the consequent crowd that developed (everyone has an opinion in China) did not disperse for 2 hours.
Once we realized that we were safe on foot, we plunged fearlessly into traffic. Sure enough the river of cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles parted like the Red Sea around us, beeping all the while. But the ultimate sense is surprising: that one is sheltered in the hands of many careful drivers.
Traffic speeds are slower than in the U.S. and it appears that drivers are more attentive. In fact I believe that it is impossible for American drivers to be as attentive as Chinese drivers: after so many years of acclimation to the "rules of the road" they are most likely unable to pay attention enough to be good Chinese-style drivers. In America, drivers hit you first and then call a lawyer and an ambulance (in that order); in China they just don't hit you.
I spent some time in a small town in Mexico that has no traffic signs or stop lights. It is called Puente de Ixtla, and all the traffic is controlled by a well thought out series of giant humps in the road. It seemed to work surprisingly well.
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In Germany the Fuerherschein (drivers license) is good for life. Pay once, use forever. Unless... And you dont want to be in that special case because it takes a long time to get a drivers license and it is quite an expensive process. Imagine being at fault and having to redo that proces with an handicap.
In North America, on the other hand, the drivers license is a right.
Imagine how well would driving improve in America if the drivers license was costing $3000+.
replacing ashphalt with cobblestones may be a waste of money, and rollerbladers won't like it, the roads will be more slippery in wet weather. But give it a shot, you'll see. A well balance suits all.
Wasn't there some politician in an eastern state who recently suggested placing un-fenced PLAYGROUNDS in the middle of the medians of busy turnpikes? In the belief that the immediate presence of unprotected children would motivate drivers to slow down? Can anybody recall what I'm talking about?
These facts and other aspects of the German psyche mean that they often ignore or don't see traffic signs. They will often try and cut in front of pedestrians and cyclists if they feel they can get away with it.
Surely this must depends where you live as I didnt
Look it up in Google. The Dutch experimented with this as far as 20 years ago, they call it "woonerf". It works. I lived in a "woonerf" for a couple of years. The Greeks (I live in Greece now) have it too, but that's because they are anarchists and take authority from no-one... Traffic lights don't work, and when they work they are ignored more often than not. Any self-respecting Greek decides for himself if and when it is safe to continue. Traffic signs are used as shooting targets and white lines alongside and in the middle of the road have a purely ornamental function: the manoeuvring space for cars, trucks, buses, donkeys and motorists is as wide as the asphalt, but on busier roads they have agreed to stick to the right side, more or less. Most people in villages don't even think twice before crossing the road, they assume that you will stop. And you will, not only for them but equally for the goats and sheep. It took me some time to get used to this system, but I feel perfectly comfortable with it now. You adopt a much more defensive driving style. B.t.w. I live in a medium size town (approximately 300,000 inhabitants).
Like a usualy red light but for some reason a green arrow is also present, on the same signal box as the red light.
Can you turn but not go?
I can't speak for the rest of the country/world, but here in California, yes. If there are arrow-shaped lights present, those lights take precedence over plain lights for traffic turning in that direction. You could have green with a red arrow or red with a green arrow or both red or both green. Also, a green arrow indicates that you have absolute right of way for turning that direction, whereas, for example, turning left across traffic at a plain green light, you must yield to incoming traffic, or turning right at a plain red light, you must yield to cross traffic. In fact those are the only instances of such 'protected turns' (as we call them) I know of.
The usual use of such light is for a pattern such as this: you have a four-way intersection of roads A and B. Both directions of road A will get a plain green light and red left-turn light (allowing only straight and right-turn traffic) while both directions of road B have all red; then switch that so both directions of road A can turn left only (or turn right after stop, yielding to the oncoming traffic turning onto road B), with no straight traffic to interfere. Then road A gets all red and road B gets the same two phases. Repeat.
I also know of a protected right-hand turn signal at a 'T' intersection in my old hometown, but I'm not quite sure why that's there. I think that light allows the ending street (the vertical line of the 'T') full green, then stops the left-turning (plain light) traffic to allow only right turns and one lane of the cross street (the horizontal line of the 'T') to go straight and turn left, then stops the right turns of the ending street and allows both lanes of the cross street to go straight or turn right, but no left turns. Repeat.
The only other stave I've driven in was Arizona, and while initially I was shocked that there was no such thing as a protected turn (wondering how the hell I would ever manage to get across oncoming traffic when turning left on busy street), but then I realized that in absence, something that never happens in California, happened; oncoming traffic which technically had the right-of-way would sometimes let left-turning traffic have space to turn left safely (by slowing down or waiting a bit to go when the lights turned green). Which maybe say something in favor of the proposed changes in the article - when people have no road signs telling them specifically what they can and cannot and must do, they are more prone to self-manage traffic by communicating with other drivers. Then again, I also remember Arizona speed limit signs being awfully polite, asking drivers to 'please not exceed' the posted limit instead of just saying SPEED LIMIT, so maybe Arizona's just a police place. But it's been a while, so my memory of that bit may be inaccurate.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
In Indonesia, especially in area where the traffic is managed by real estate developers/mall developers/residents instead of government, signs can really contradict each other 100%. For example, a road can have an arrow going to it and forbidden signs together./ 11/examples-of-contradictory-road-signs.html
I think I'll start gathering such photographs. I'll post them at http://nothing-about-everything.blogspot.com/2006
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
I know you jest, but still.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I am sure you don't know there are Muslim countries without Sharia law and even one that is secular (unlike the UK that has an official state religion).
Why bother wtih the facts when spreading falsehoods is much more fun?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
- It has nothing to do with the topic at hand (traffic signs, remember?).
- It makes an idiotic comment inciting raging responses (which is fine, it is part of the fun, but it should be classed accordingly so it can be filtered).
And finally slamming any proto Nazis is not supressing freedom of speech. For the German people is a matter of self preservation.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There are facts that not even the most ardent Turkish Nationalist disputes:
- More than 1 million Armenian were forcefully removed from their homes.
- They all were killed.
Where you get this idea that Turks don't accept the above as fact would be interesting to know.
After this it is all a matter of semantics, but the facts are hardly disputed as you are trying to imply. The current Turkish orthodoxy is that such calamity was an event of war, not an organized holocaust.
But facts at these, that shame a nation, take some time to emerge, but emerging they are, and many leading Turkish intellectuals are hammering the point home, because facts exist and can;t be ignored.
Funnily (if such a word has place here) enough, Ataturk and the people that replaced the Ottoman Empire in power had no qualms to denounce Turkey's actions once they gained power, it was politicians after Ataturk that felt somewhoh Turkey's image was tarnished, most likely after relizing how many similarities they were with an holocaust of bigger numerical proportions.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... that can learn a handful of English words in order to drive a car.
Our brain size must be smaller or something.
Oh wait, which language is this?
Never mind.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The different ways people organize to be served is different in different places. That has nothing to do with good manners and personal responsibility. In many places in Asia you have to gently elbow your way to the front of a queue, in Mexico you touch people in the shoulder so they move aside if you are in a rush.
As for your tirade about Socialism, it is ridiculous to the point of contempt.
People in Europe do not fear Socialism because it is seen as the ultimate sign of individual responsibility: to empower a government that will tax you for the benefit of all.
People in the US don;t understand that, which is OK, bu do not tell me that the narcisistic lifestyle of many USIans (specially in big, cosmopolitan cities) is more responsible (at least from a social point of view) than the people in the Scandinavian countries which are happy to part with half their salary if that means everybody gets a fiar share or a communal social security net.
Tell us, how is life without healht insurance in the US?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Do you use horse-sense while driving? Perhaps this would work better than common sense. I wonder if anyone has done studies on the herd/pack mentality of animals and how they would navigate through a situation analogous to high-density traffic.
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Nice idea (for a short term time). Nevertheless, human beings need guiding and rules to survive in the long term. We are developing another road sign paradigm, still not exploited: onboard road signalling based in buried RFID roadbeacons. More here: www.roadbeacon.com
Some day, we'll see a traffic school where the first (and only) thing they teach you is: 1) Limited visibility is a problem if, and ONLY if, the obstacles you hit are prone to slowing you down :)
Bus lanes work quite well in Paris, since it has big streats, but London needed the congestion charge.
Bus lanes might work in NYC too, but Americans use cars much more. Also bus lanes are usually supported by the caby loby since cabs are usually permitted in bus lanes, but NYC does not have this option.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I think that it's true that Americans use cars more in general, but that isn't really true in NYC. I think that 80% of the commuters use public transit here. The public transit system is pretty complete... as long as you stay on the trains. The buses here are so slow that it is simply not worth using them at peak hours. I would never get on a bus at rush hour - not even to get across town - it's actually faster to go into midtown on the 6 and change trains to get to the West side... that's pretty pathetic.
Even if they implemented a "bus rapid transit"(BRT) system in NYC, it wouldn't move enough people. Even one bus arriving every minute couldn't compete with a subway train for throughput. I guess that is why they are putting in a 2nd avenue line, and seem only ho-hum about putting in BRT.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What country would that be? That does not happen in any proper democratic European nation. I'm of course not including Russia in my definition of Europe - where that might actually happen. Russia is not a fully democratic nation, just like the US. Now, if you only knew the level of taxes in Europe you would not think twice about asking for a refund from the US government. The "insanely" high taxes you mention are about 32-35% for me. We do not pay local, county, state or federal taxes - just the single income tax. From what my American friends tell me the tax burden here is in fact LOWER. However there are about 50 countries in Europe so it certainly varies. Americans have been fed the propaganda about "socialist" Europe for far too long. I am quite happy about living in a safe, democratic country that ranks far above the US :)