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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
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
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. :)
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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/
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...
I will be eagerly awaiting the 2100 issue!
- Kevin B. McCarty
"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.
No. Here in the US traffic is dangerous because:
- Driving tests consist of driving around the block. Literally.
And as far as laws are concerned:
- People running stop lights do not get cited
- People ignoring right of way do not get cited
- People who do not signal turns do not get cited
- People who pass in right-turn-only lanes do not get cited
- Drunk drivers are not chased and caught if you report them (I do not bother reporting them any more)
- Laws restricting traveling in the breakdown lane are unenforced
Instead, police focus on pulling over speeders on the highway outside of rush hour (more revenue for the town), which does not improve safety at ALL.
Also, we've made our cars far too safe (causing them to become heavier, require more fuel, AND slower than european models) which gives asshole drivers the feeling of confidence. After all, if you have an integral rollcage, airbags, and law-required seatbelts, why should you have to drive courteously? Fuck everyone else, after all, you're #1.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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?
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.
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.
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