[CMI-CM] we do it in the road every month

[Zachary C. Miller]

Traffic designers propose permanent Critical Mass. Cool.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/05/20/traffic_design/index.html

Why don't we do it in the road?
A new school of traffic design says we should get rid of stop signs and 
red lights and let cars, bikes and people mingle together. It sounds 
insane, but it works.

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By Linda Baker


May 20, 2004  |  It's rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui 
and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the 
red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for 
a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left 
in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of 
migrating birds, however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, 
the taxis and bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down 
the street, unperturbed and fatality free. 

In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. "There are no rules," as one 
local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 
900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and 
assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay 
little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side 
of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to 
barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads. 

But here's the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I 
didn't see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any 
of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for 
traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars 
because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the 
streets. On the contrary, the urban arterials are a communal mix of 
automobiles, cyclists, pedestrians, and small businesses such as 
inner-tube repairmen that set up shop directly in the right-of-way. 

As the mother of two young children and an alternative-transportation 
advocate, I've spent the past decade supporting the installation of ever 
more traffic controls: crosswalks, traffic signals, speed bumps, and speed 
limit signs in school zones. But I'd only been in Suzhou a few days before 
I started thinking that maybe there's a method to the city's traffic 
madness -- a logic that has nothing to do with the system of prohibition 
and segregation that governs transportation policy in the United States. 

As it turns out, I'm far from the first person to think along these lines. 
In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is 
becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland 
Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It's called "second 
generation" traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and 
urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral 
psychology and -- of all subjects -- evolutionary biology. Rejecting the 
idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that 
privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and 
intrigue over certainty. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: 
between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists 
and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play. 

For the past 50 years, the American approach to traffic safety has been 
dominated by the "triple E" paradigm: engineering, enforcement and 
education. And yet, the idea of the street as a flexible community space 
is a provocative one in the United States, precisely because other 
"traditional" modes of transportation -- light rail, streetcars and 
bicycles -- are making a comeback in cities across the country. The 
shared-street concept is also intriguing for the way it challenges one of 
the fundamental tenets of American urban planning: that to create safe 
communities, you have to control them. 

"One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears 
chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having 
your wits about you," says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben 
Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. "The history of 
traffic engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be 
chaos," he says. "Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be 
productive." 

A few years ago, Hamilton-Baillie spent several months researching traffic 
and street design in northwest Europe, followed by a stint as a Loeb 
fellow at Harvard. A former researcher at Sustrans, a 
sustainable-transportation nonprofit agency, he has become a leading 
proponent of the shared-spaces and second-generation approach, which he 
says meets the needs of automobiles while returning streets to their 
historic function as civic gathering places. 

But the implications, especially in the United States, are nothing less 
than radical. Reversing decades of conventional wisdom on traffic 
engineering, Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety 
and vehicular capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, 
such as stop signs and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into 
lanes. Without any clear right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to 
slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and 
other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed. 

"The more you post the evidence of legislative control, such as traffic 
signs, the less the driver is trying to use his or her own senses," says 
Hamilton-Baillie, noting he has a habit of walking randomly across roads 
-- much to his wife's consternation. "So the less you can advertise the 
presence of the state in terms of authority, the more effective this 
approach can be." This, of course, is the exact opposite of the "Triple E" 
traffic-calming approach, which seeks to control the driver through the 
use of speed bumps, photo radar, crosswalks and other engineering and 
enforcement mechanisms. 

The "self-reading street" has its roots in the Dutch "woonerf" design 
principles that emerged in the 1970s. Blurring the boundary between street 
and sidewalk, woonerfs combine innovative paving, landscaping and other 
urban designs to allow for the integration of multiple functions in a 
single street, so that pedestrians, cyclists and children playing share 
the road with slow-moving cars. The pilot projects were so successful in 
fostering better urban environments that the ideas spread rapidly to 
Belgium, France, Denmark and Germany. In 1998, the British government 
adopted a "Home Zones" initiative -- the woonerf equivalent -- as part of 
its national transportation policy. 

"What the early woonerf principles realized," says Hamilton-Baillie, "was 
that there was a two-way interaction between people and traffic. It was a 
vicious or, rather, a virtuous circle: The busier the streets are, the 
safer they become. So once you drive people off the street, they become 
less safe." 

Contrast this approach with that of the United Kingdom and the United 
States, where education campaigns from the 1960s onward were based on 
maintaining a clear separation between the highway and the rest of the 
public realm. Children were trained to modify their behavior and, under 
pain of death, to stay out of the street. "But as soon as you emphasize 
separation of functions, you have a more dangerous environment," says 
Hamilton-Baillie. "Because then the driver sees that he or she has 
priority. And the child who forgets for a moment and chases a ball across 
the street is a child in the wrong place." 

When it comes to reconfiguring streets as community spaces, ground zero is 
once again Holland and Denmark, where planners are removing traffic lights 
in some towns and cities, as well as white divider lines, sidewalks and 
speed limits. Research has shown that fatality rates at busy 
intersections, where two or three people were being killed every year, 
dropped to zero when controls and boundaries were taken away. (This is 
food for thought among alternative-transportation advocates in the United 
States, who extol northern Europe as a model precisely because so much 
space in these countries is dedicated to segregated pedestrian spaces and 
bike lanes.) 

A photo of a reconstructed intersection, "the Brink," in the Dutch 
province of Friesland, provides more design details. Until 1998, the Brink 
was a standard asphalt intersection with traffic controls and segregated 
spaces. Today, the entire area has been repaved with red bricks bordered 
by sections of green railing. A raised piazza juts into the middle of the 
intersection, but there are no sidewalks, road markings, or right-of-way 
signs. Every day, 4,500 cars share the space with cyclists and pedestrians 
who wander about "the road" at will. 

Hamilton-Baillie recalls visiting "the Brink" with Hans Mondermann of the 
Friesland Regional Organization for Traffic Safety, a planner who has 
redesigned several intersections with second-generation ideas in mind. "I 
was amazed to hear him say, 'Have you ever seen so many traffic 
violations?'" said Hamilton-Baillie. "'No rules, no rules,' he told me. 
'You have to think.'" 

Subvert, don't attack, the dominant paradigm. Or, as David Engwicht, a 
shared-spaces proponent in Brisbane, Australia, has written: "Implicit in 
the whole notion of second-generation traffic calming is the idea that 
significant social change only happens when we amplify the paradoxical 
'submerged voice' as opposed to tearing down the 'dominant voice.' 
Engwicht, a plenary speaker at the Walk 21 Cities for People Conference in 
Copenhagen this June, argues that controlling a driver's natural 
propensity for speed is futile. A more effective approach is to engage the 
driver by emphasizing "uncertainty and intrigue" in the street environment 
-- for example, planting a tree in the middle of the street instead of 
putting up a stop sign. 

"Standardized signage and use of standardized road markings should be 
reduced to a minimum," Engwicht writes. "As they create predictability and 
contain no intrigue. They also reinforce that a street belongs exclusively 
to the motorists." 

There's another step in the second-generation logic process. Safety 
analysts have known for several decades that the maximum vehicle speed at 
which pedestrians can escape severe injury upon impact is just under 20 
miles per hour. Research also suggests that an individual's ability to 
interact and retain eye contact with other human beings diminishes rapidly 
at speeds greater than 20 miles per hour. One theory behind this magic 
bullet, says Hamilton-Baillie, is that 20 mph is the "maximum theoretical 
running speed" for human beings. (Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has 
drawn similar conclusions.) "This is of interest," he says, "because it 
suggests that our physiology and psychology has evolved based around the 
potential maximum impact on the speed of human beings." 

The ramifications go beyond safety, says Hamilton-Baillie, to bear 
directly on the interplay between speed, traffic controls and vehicle 
capacity. Evidence from countries and cities that have introduced a design 
speed of 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.5 mph) -- as many of the 
European Union nations are doing -- shows that slower speeds improve 
traffic flow and reduce congestion. 

"This surprises many people, although mathematically it's not surprising," 
Hamilton-Baillie says. "The reason for this is that your speed of journey, 
the ability of traffic to move smoothly through the built environment, 
depends on performance of your intersections, not on your speed of flow 
between intersections." And intersections, he says, work much more 
efficiently at lower speeds. "At 30 miles per hour, you frequently need 
control systems like traffic signals, which themselves mean that the 
intersection is not in use for significant periods of time. Whereas at 
slower speeds vehicles can move much more closely together and drivers can 
use eye contact to engage and make decisions. So you get much higher 
capacity." 

Combining slower speeds with a reduction in traffic controls, in other 
words, may have more than public safety and shared-space benefits. It also 
appears to profit the driver. (This is the logic behind the modern 
roundabout, a redesigned version of the classic traffic circle that is 
replacing signalized intersections in the United Kingdom and is gaining 
acceptance among transportation officials in the United States). 

"You can see this is the way to break out of the pro-car, anti-car 
debate," Hamilton-Baillie says. "Because the shared approach very much 
accepts the car as a vital useful component in cities that will remain 
with us for some generations to come." 

Let's return to China for a minute. If traffic in the world's most 
populous country provides a useful comparison and contrast, it's because 
second-generation traffic calming isn't about anarchy; it's about studied 
anarchy. In essence, Hamilton-Baillie is advocating for a new field: one 
that blends traffic engineering with urban design. Or, as he titled an 
upcoming paper: "Urban Design: Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" There's a 
place for highways and roads dedicated solely to the movement of 
automobiles, he says. Just not in the city, where streets constitute 70 
percent of all public space. 

"You have to have a completely different approach to the design of streets 
in the broad urban realm," he says. "You have to make an absolutely clear 
transition between those roads that are necessary, the state-controlled 
and legislative world of the traffic environment, to the human-controlled, 
culturally controlled world of the city, where you pick up your rules not 
from what you're allowed to do, but from a much more subtle and complex 
series of codes that are implicit through design and environment." 

"If I walk into your living room, I do not need a sign that says, Do Not 
Spit on the Floor," he explains. "Indeed, if there were such a sign, it 
would probably be counterproductive." 

Over the last few years, the shared-street concept has emigrated out of 
mainland Europe to the United Kingdom. In addition to home zones, which 
are cropping up in isolated residential developments, the city of 
Manchester is currently reconfiguring a major section of its central core 
according to shared-space principles. Hamilton-Baillie himself is working 
a project that he says is the first in the country to bring together all 
the elements of second-generation traffic calming: removing the road 
markings from a road that runs past a primary school in the city of Bath. 
It's a project, he says, that capitalizes on the area's "rich urban 
morphology" -- St. James Square, the school and a historic church -- to 
"create a series of places rather than a single highway." 

In the United States, as one might expect, policymakers haven't exactly 
embraced the virtues of ambiguity and uncertainty embodied in 
second-generation principles. "Woonerfs are certainly being planned on 
private property," says James Daisa, a project manager at Kimley-Horn 
Associates and a national expert on pedestrian-friendly development. "But 
the concept has yet to come to bear on public streets." City codes are 
part of the problem, he says. The reluctance of traffic engineers is 
another. 

Consider the case of Brookline, Mass., which installed a woonerf in front 
of a Marriott Hotel last January. A patchwork of brick pavings, the 
shared-space lacks big curbs, and the sidewalk and street are all at the 
same level. But as reporter Anthony Flint noted in the Boston Globe, the 
public works department botched the entire concept by painting white lines 
and big right-turn arrows on the street, and placing 
yellow-and-black-striped rectangles on the landscaped "bump-outs." 

"It's clear that advocates and private developers aren't sufficient to 
bring about a true woonerf," wrote Flint. "The traffic engineers need to 
be in the room, and they need to understand the concept. A fact-finding 
trip to the Netherlands may be in order." 

For their part, many American traffic engineers say one critical 
ingredient is missing for a system built around shared spaces to work in 
the United States: a communal sensibility. "We live in a culture that 
gives so much value to the individual and the expression of that is how we 
act in a car," says Robert Burchfield, a city traffic engineer in my home 
town of Portland, Ore., which is nationally recognized for its 
preservation of public space and its dedicated network of cycling lanes 
and pedestrian pathways. "I'm not comfortable with less order when I can't 
get people to go below 50 or 60 miles per hour." 

But this, of course, is precisely the point; redesign the street 
environment as an active community space, and you equalize the power 
relationship between cars and human beings "The real gain in urban quality 
does not come from clawing back areas of the city from cars, as important 
as that is," said Hamilton-Baillie, who gave a talk at the Portland 
Department of Transportation last fall. "But the next step is how you 
apply a broader approach to those areas where you need cars and trucks, 
bicycles and shops, and pedestrians and children's play, all those 
different functions to take place in precious urban space." 

Even if we're not ready to send our children merrily into the street, many 
of us, intuitively, have already embraced the concepts behind 
second-generation traffic calming. Like most other parents, I've drilled 
into my kids the fact that traffic lights and signs work for cars, but 
don't necessarily serve pedestrians who want to make it across the street 
in one piece. "Look left, look right, look left again," I preach ad 
nauseum -- even when the walk signal is green. And who can resist the 
symbolism associated with recapturing the street for the (teeming) masses? 
It's not quite the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the shared-space approach 
overturns the landmarks of sedentary isolation -- everything from gated 
communities to skyrocketing childhood obesity rates -- to celebrate the 
complexity and contradictions of city life. 

The absence of traffic controls means that people are out for themselves; 
the trick is, they have to look out for everyone else as well. 
Second-generation traffic design is a curious mix of selfishness and 
altruism, of order amid chaos. And, after a fashion, it just might work. 


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About the writer
Linda Baker is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon. 

-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet - Ya Basta!
 Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Feminism,
 Sustainability, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy, Ecology