Authors: Tom Vanderbilt
Instead of speed bumps, which tell drivers to drive as fast as they can before they hit the next speed bump, Engwicht argues that intrigue and uncertainty—the things that active cities are filled with—are the best remedies for traffic problems. Put a child’s bike on the side of the road instead of a speed bump; hang a weird sculpture instead of a speed-limit sign. One of Engwicht’s signature tactics is to set up a “Street Reclaiming Chair,” a bright throne of sorts, in the middle of a local street and then, wearing a large colorful crown, chat with passing drivers who, not surprisingly, have slowed. The Danish Road Safety Council got at this idea in a different way in a film a few years ago that showed a mock new traffic-calming scheme: topless Danish models standing on the side of the road holding speed-limit signs. In this case, the “flashing” signs worked quite well.
More than twenty-five years after the Oudehaske incident, the speed through the village is the same—and no one has had to take off their shirts. “That experience changed my whole idea about how to change behavior,” Monderman told me. “It proved that when you use the context of the village as a source of information, people are absolutely willing to change their behavior.” Monderman was, in essence, thinking like an architect in a realm that had been handed over entirely to engineers. In constructing a building, engineers are essential to making it function, but it is architects we call upon to determine how the building will be used, to organize the space. “Each user of a house knows that a kitchen is used differently from the bathroom,” Monderman said. “You don’t have to explain.” Why not make the difference between a village road and the rural highway that flows into it as legible?
Monderman continued to toil away in relative obscurity, his non-traditional techniques tolerated in small doses. Then came a request to do something about the traffic situation at the Laweiplein, a four-way crossing in the city of Drachten. The traffic volume was relatively high—twenty thousand cars a day, plus many scores of cyclists and pedestrians—and congestion was a growing problem. “The traffic lights were so slow,” Monderman recalled. But the challenge, as he saw it, was not just moving traffic through as quickly as possible; the Laweiplein “was also the heart of the village. It was exactly the place meant for people. But it was a horrible place, all poles and paint and fences.”
Simply replacing the four-way signalized intersection with a roundabout was only half a solution. “Roundabouts work for traffic wonderfully, but in a more city-building type of way they destroy any quality of space,” Monderman said. “It’s a circular pattern, and most cities have a grid. It doesn’t fit in the space; it’s telling the wrong story.” What Monderman wanted was a traditional village square that just so happened to contain a roundabout: a “squareabout.” After seven years of design and construction, the new Laweiplein was unveiled. It was the intersection heard around the world. Seeing it for the first time, one is immediately struck by how clean and open the space looks. Then one begins to realize why. There are no signs, no traffic lights, no zebra-striped poles, no raised curbs, none of the ugly and cheap roadside junk we have come to think is part of our “natural” world. There are simply four roads coming into a small circle at the center of a large square. The space is dominated not by the roads but by sidewalks and a series of fountains whose water gushes higher as more traffic enters the crossing.
As one looks longer, it becomes clear how well it all flows. No one ever seems to come to a stop, neither cars nor cyclists. “Sometimes a car has to slow down, you think he’s stopping—no, he’s creeping and is going on again. You actually see all the brains of people working together in a much more organic, fluid way,” said Monderman. Then he demonstrated one of his favorite tricks. He began to walk into the roundabout, continuing our conversation. He walked backward. He closed his eyes. It may have just been unnatural Dutch patience at work, but cars, already on the lookout for other cars and cyclists, seemed to regard him as just another obstacle to interact with, and so they steered around him, slowly. “What is nice,” he noted, “is that even in the strongest traffic-oriented type of crossing, behavior can be steered by the context.”
This seemed a kind of group enactment of the traffic experiments Ian Walker had conducted on the roads in Bath. People were taking stock of one another, making decisions, and acting accordingly in the moment. Ben Hamilton-Baillie, an English transportation planner who has allied with Monderman in a movement known as Shared Space, talks about seeing scores of little moments in Drachten like the one in which a Dutch mother on a bike, carrying a kid, merges in front of a big truck with little more than the smallest flicker of eye contact and the slightest lift of a finger. To many people, this might seem scary, perhaps even slightly insane. And maybe just
Dutch.
Hamilton-Baillie suggests that there is something crucial in the fact that above 20 miles per hour, humans begin to lose eye contact. “As social creatures it is incredibly important for humans to exchange rapid messages about status and other traits,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of time watching the junction. What are the rules? There’s clearly a hierarchy. If you were a confident young businesswoman in a suit you sailed straight through; if you were a hesitant tourist you waited. Your position in the hierarchy could apparently be established in a microsecond.” But all this has to happen at
human speeds.
The faster we drive, the less we see. Hamilton-Baillie suggests that it is more than coincidental that as drivers get above 20 miles per hour, we lose eye contact with pedestrians, while our chances of dying as pedestrians if hit by a car also begin to soar dramatically. As humans with an evolutionary history, we are presumably not meant to move faster than we can run, which tops out at around 20 miles per hour. In the modern world, Hamilton-Baillie adds, this may explain why being struck by a car becomes so much more exponentially deadly above that speed.
Monderman insisted that what he was doing was not anarchy. Instead, he said, he was replacing the traffic world with the social world. “I always say to people: I don’t care if you wear a raincoat or a Volkswagen Golf, you’re a human being, and I address you as a human being. I want you to behave as a human being. I don’t care what kind of vehicle you drive.” People, his argument goes, know what a roundabout looks like, and they know what its rules are, so why should they be told again? If they’re unsure about what to do or feel insecure, they can do what people do in any situation where they’re unsure or insecure, be it a cocktail party or the first day of school: Learn by watching others, and proceed cautiously.
This gets to the heart of a controversy about how to make traffic safer. Not everyone acts cautiously. People
do
drive like idiots. As I argued in the first chapter, traffic makes it hard for us to be human. Drivers, insulated in their anonymous cocoons and holding a three-thousand-pound advantage, kill hundreds of pedestrians every day around the world. Would it not be better to segregate people and cars and bikes to the greatest extent possible? Would it not be better to have as many signs, lights, guardrails, signals, bollards, and zebra crossings as possible?
Hamilton-Baillie does not agree that drivers are incapable of understanding social norms and conventions and need to be under the constant control of mechanical devices and signs. “You can quite quickly instill in children a sense of what’s appropriate behavior: when you can talk loudly and quietly, or how to join a conversation; when you can fart and when you can’t,” he explained one night in a restaurant in the Dutch city of Groningen. “What you get by transferring the control systems to cultural or social norms [is that] you then empower other people to tackle the issue themselves. If someone was misbehaving in here, there would come a point at which someone would say, ‘C’mon, mate, get out of here.’” But anyone driving the roads today can see that many people do not obey social conventions, or even laws. “Of course there will be people who ignore those conventions,” he said. “Such behavior will exist even in a legislated context. But you don’t control teenage joyriding through legislation.”
Most of our daily life is governed by social conventions. In the elegant Tiffany store on Fifth Avenue in New York, there aren’t any “No Spitting” signs, but there are probably few people who choose to expectorate there (and not simply because a security guard would toss them out). To return to the queues of the last chapter, when one enters a McDonald’s there are no signs that say, “Do Not Cut in Line.” But chances are people do not (of course, in some places they may, but this is a point I’m saving for Chapter 8). I can hear you protesting: People violate social conventions every day. They talk on their cell phones when signs ask them not to. And traffic is dangerous. How could you take the “Yield” sign away from a roundabout and not cause chaos? How would people figure out how to negotiate the crossing without traffic signals? If anything, we need more signals and signs!
We have a strange, almost fetishistic belief in the power of signals. If a visitor from a planet without cars were to visit Earth, he might be truly perplexed by the strange daubs of paint on the street, the arrows blinking in the air. Do you remember the children’s game Red Light, Green Light? The person acting as the stoplight would stand with his back to the other players and announce, “Green light.” The players would move forward. Then he would say, “Red light” and spin around. If you didn’t stop before he saw you, you were “out.” What makes the game work is that children do not always stop in time. Nor do adults in real life, which is even more complicated, because we have things like yellow lights—do I stop or do I go? A line on the street or a light in the air may keep cities from getting sued (as long as it doesn’t malfunction), but it does nothing to prevent a driver from misbehaving, perhaps even killing someone. Traffic signals assign priority; they do not provide safety. The high number of people killed by drivers running a red light—the sort of thing a roundabout with a nice big fountain in the middle tends to cure—is proof enough of this.
Or consider, for a moment, the urban pedestrian “Walk” signal. Surely this seemingly enlightened bit of design must be vital to the safety of people on foot? Yes, except that at most intersections it happens to accompany the invitation for drivers to make a turn. The result is that every year, many pedestrians, correctly believing themselves to have the right-of-way, are killed while walking in the crosswalk by perfectly sober drivers who have paid slavish attention only to their own green light. (Or they may have had their view obscured by their car’s roof pillar, a problem particularly in left turns, when the pillar looms in the center of the driver’s vision.) Things are even worse where right turns are permitted on red; for drivers, rights on red may be the only “cultural advantage” of Los Angeles, as Woody Allen joked, but studies have shown that they are a distinct disadvantage for the health of pedestrians. The sad fact is that more urban pedestrians are killed while legally crossing in crosswalks than while jaywalking. Granted, the number of people who use the crosswalk is higher, but this does not diminish the point that more pedestrians are killed in New York City while obeying the law than while not.
Careful jaywalking, particularly on one-way streets, can be safer than confident crossing at the crosswalk (where the pedestrian may have to worry about streams of traffic from different directions). A similar phenomenon seems to occur at the crosswalks one finds at places without traffic signals. Confusingly, there are two types; they seem different but are legally the same: “marked” versus “unmarked.” Marked crosswalks are easy to identify: two lines across the pavement. In most jurisdictions in the United States and elsewhere, unmarked crosswalks exist at any place, like intersections, where there are connecting sidewalks on either side of the street. Even though there may be no visible crosswalk line connecting the sidewalks, legally, there is: Drivers must yield to crossing pedestrians, even at intersections that are “uncontrolled” (i.e., there are no stop signs). One might think that marked crosswalks, which send clear signals to all, would be preferable. But marked crosswalks are actually no safer than unmarked crosswalks, and in some cases are actually more dangerous, particularly when pedestrians, like the hero of the old video game Frogger, must navigate several lanes.
Studies do show that motorists are more likely to yield to pedestrians in marked crosswalks than at unmarked crosswalks. But as University of California, Berkeley, researchers David Ragland and Meghan Fehlig Mitman found, that does not necessarily make things safer. When they compared the way pedestrians crossed at both kinds of crosswalks on roads with considerable traffic volumes, they found that people at unmarked crosswalks tended to look both ways more often, waited more often for gaps in traffic, and crossed the road more quickly. Researchers suspect that both drivers and pedestrians are more aware that drivers should yield to pedestrians in marked crosswalks (even though 35 percent of drivers polled did
not
know this). But neither are aware of this fact when it comes to unmarked crosswalks. Not knowing traffic safety laws, it turns out, is actually a good thing for pedestrians. Because they do not know whether cars are supposed to stop—or if they will—they act more cautiously. Marked crosswalks, by contrast, may give pedestrians an unrealistic picture of their own safety.
If signs and symbols do not always achieve their intended results,
removing
road markings can have surprising effects. White lines on the road are commonly thought to be a fundamental element of a safe road. Indeed, on high-speed roads they are essential. Drivers are able to travel at high speeds without crashing into one another or running off the road only if they have a consistent sense of their lane position. Think of the nervous moment, as you’re approaching a toll station, when all the lines disappear and the road opens into a vast alluvial fan (not to mention the equally disturbing confusion on exiting as everyone jockeys for position).