Authors: Tom Vanderbilt
But what about on roads with 30-mile-per-hour speed limits? Don’t we still need lines to keep people in their own lanes and to prevent them from smashing into one another? A study in England’s Wiltshire County looked at two similar roads, one that had a center line, and a narrower one on which the line had been removed. Drivers actually did a better job of staying in their own lane on the road with no center line. Even though the road with no center line was narrower than the road with a line, vehicles still managed to stay farther away from oncoming vehicles (by 40 percent) than on the road with a line. They also tended to slow down in the face of oncoming traffic. What was going on? Apparently, the drivers were not using the road markings but were using their brains—and the results, far from chaos, seemed to indicate more order. What white lines do is enable drivers to drive faster and, intentionally or not, closer together. Similarly, several studies in different countries have found that drivers tend to give cyclists more space as they pass when they are on a street
without
a bicycle lane. The white marking seems to work as a subliminal signal to drivers that they need to act less cautiously—that it’s the edge of the lane, and not the cyclist, they need to worry about. (This suggests that
no
bicycle lanes are better for cyclists than insufficiently wide bicycle lanes.)
Hans Monderman was quite aware that by removing signals and markings, he made people feel more at risk in the Laweiplein. This was a good thing. “We feel it is unsafe,” residents told him. “I think that’s wonderful,” he told me. “Otherwise I would have changed it immediately.” There would even be a benefit to some crashes, he added: “I hope that some small accidents happen, as part of the learning process of society.” Monderman was delighted when his son had his first minor mishap in a car. In fact, he said, he would have paid for him to have it: “He knows that he is vulnerable, with his own responsibility for his behavior. Having an accident should be part of the driving course. I think that these small accidents help in avoiding severe accidents.”
But here is the funny thing. Since the Laweiplein was converted into a “squareabout,” the number of crashes, according to a preliminary study by the local technical college, has dropped. In 2005, there were none at all. Well, that’s because everyone is moving more slowly, right? Perhaps. But there are a few other interesting facts. Since the conversion, the average time to cross the intersection has dropped by 40 percent, even as traffic has increased. The time buses had to wait to get through has been cut by as much as half. All traffic, the college found, seems to move at a constant flow, and even at peak hours, the movement is steady, if slow—and any traffic engineer will tell you how important it is for drivers to be able to sense progress. The report noted something else interesting: More cyclists were using hand signals when moving in the roundabout; this, the report claimed, was unusual behavior in the Netherlands. More drivers were using their signals, as well. The responsibility for getting through the intersection was now up to the users, and they responded by communicating among themselves. The result was that the system was safer, even though the majority of users, polled in local surveys, felt that the system was more dangerous!
In changing the design in Drachten, Monderman was really asking, What is this street for? What are cities for? Monderman had said he would never widen the streets leading into the Drachten crossing. People were coming for the city, not for the traffic. “Cities are never roads” is how Joost Váhl describes it. Freed from a sense that they are in a city or a village, and instead are simply on a road, drivers respond in kind. They take their information not from local context but from standardized signs. “When you removed all the things that made people know where they were, what they were a part of, then you had to explain things,” Monderman said.
There can be a power in not explaining things. In Culemborg, Váhl and I, joined by Hamilton-Baillie, pedaled out to a crossing on the outskirts of town where a long, straight highway comes into the village. Marking the crossing are two yellow lights that rise out of the ground. They are actually lanterns, of the sort hung around the canals in the Dutch city of Utrecht, turned upside down. They’re not standard traffic devices. Váhl installed them in an effort to get drivers to slow down as they careened in off the rural highway. “It’s making clear that there is something strange,” he told me. “It’s not common that there are lights like this.” But doesn’t the strange become familiar quickly? That’s why Váhl placed them so close together. It looks as if two cars may not make it through. But, as Váhl explained, with a hint of whimsy, “It is four meters and twenty in between the yellow things. It makes it possible that you don’t hit the mirror of the other car.” With practice the drivers may get used to this as well—but how can they be sure that the approaching driver is a local? Best to slow down.
What if, instead of the strange lanterns, approaching drivers were faced with a speed-limit sign? First, they might not even look at it. Second, they might worry about getting a ticket, but perhaps experience has taught them there is usually no cop there. Third, a speed-limit sign just announces a number. It says nothing about the fact that one is now in a village, where children or bicyclists might be present. Nor does it communicate risk. Forcing drivers to slow down, in order to save their own skins, just might be the best way to help save others’ skins.
All this crazy stuff might be fine for provincial Dutch cities and English villages, with their relatively low traffic volumes and speeds. And in the Netherlands, where 27 percent of daily local trips are made on bicycles, drivers are much more experienced in interacting with cyclists. This sort of thing simply would not work in a large city in another country, you might think. Or would it?
Kensington High Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in one of London’s poshest neighborhoods, is worth taking a look at, as I did one day with Peter Weeden, a senior engineer with the Traffic Section of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. By the 1990s, Weeden recalled, the street was in a sorry state, and merchants were concerned about losing business to a large new shopping development being planned nearby. There was little aesthetic coordination, with the streets and sidewalks a jumble of different materials. “There was lots of clutter and street signs,” Weeden explained. “They were put up with the best of intentions, but always on a very piecemeal basis. Someone comes along and puts up a sign for speed humps, someone else comes along and puts up another. Over time you end up with a forest of signs, most of which, it turns out, are not actually required.”
The borough wanted the street to look better, but not at the expense of traffic flow or safety. “As well as being a shopping and residential high street, it’s also one of the main arterial routes in and out of West London,” said Weeden. Some 2,500 cars course down the street in a busy hour, while as many as 3,000 pedestrians spill out of the main tube station. Where the usual approach would have been to dig into the trusty traffic engineer’s “toolkit,” this time the Kensington planners began by throwing out everything that had been done before. “What we did was to actually strip out ninety-five percent of the signs in Kensington High Street,” said Weeden.
They wanted to see what was really necessary and what was simply there because some engineer assumed it had to be. The guardrails lining both sides of the street, a not uncommon sight in London, were also removed in an effort to reduce visual clutter. “There is a very strong case for taking out guard railing,” noted Weeden. “Wheelchair users don’t like it; there are vision problems. Cyclists don’t like it; they can get trapped between the vehicle and the rail if they get cut off. And the segregation between travel modes has been found to increase vehicles’ speeds—you think you’re going to own that space.” The plan was not without critics—including the city’s department of traffic engineering. “Transport for London thought we were taking unacceptable risks,” Weeden said. But the Kensington engineers were not just casually saying, “Let’s rip out all the traffic signs.” They began by altering only a small test section, then waited to see what would happen.
Walking down the street, I noticed, as with Drachten, how much more clean and pleasant it looked without all the traffic markings, railings, and signs. It felt more like a city street should, and not like a slalom course for cars or a veal pen for pedestrians. The sidewalk felt connected to the street. There were several traffic lights, and while some pedestrians did cross at the light, there was no marked zebra crossing. Most people crossed elsewhere, in any case. No longer steered toward the crosswalk by the railing, they crossed where they chose to, navigating their way through the slow but steady flow of cars, buses, and bikes, pausing halfway on a center island.
Having tossed away the bulk of the safety improvements put in over the years for cars and for pedestrians, what happened? Chaos and destruction? Quite the reverse. Pedestrian KSIs (“killed or seriously injured”) dropped 60 percent, with a similar decline for minor injuries. Weeden and his colleagues were as surprised as anyone. “The scheme itself never set out to be an accident-reduction scheme,” he told me. “It was really just for aesthetic reasons, to encourage people to shop there. As a by-product we found that accident rates had dropped.”
By making the street look better, they also made it safer. Perhaps this is not an accident. Cities are meant to be places for mixing with others, for improvised encounters, for observing details at a human scale. (Hamilton-Baillie says that London taxi drivers he interviewed reported liking the new scheme without quite knowing why, though they did cite the presence of “pretty girls” as a positive.) “This world of standardized, regulated kit—traffic islands, bollards, road markings, safety barriers, signs, signals—it’s all a world completely separated to whatever happens behind it,” said Hamilton-Baillie. “It’s a world that we have been taught, and created policy, to say is an alien world. You’ve got to press a button to get permission to cross it.” Drivers, absolved from their social responsibility by the mandates of the traffic world, accordingly act in antisocial ways. Pedestrians, tired of being steered far out of their way to cross the street or being inordinately delayed by cars in the many cases where they are the majority, rebel against the safety measures that have supposedly been erected for their benefit. The safety measures cause drivers and pedestrians to act in more dangerous ways.
A favorite example for Hamilton-Baillie of how things can be different is Seven Dials in London, the small circular junction in the Covent Garden district where seven streets converge. At a small plaza in the center, marked by a sundial, it’s not uncommon to find people eating their lunch or to see them strolling across the roundabout, even as cars navigate their way slowly around the space. There are no guardrails protecting the pedestrians sitting in the center from the road. There are no speed bumps on the approaches. There are no signs warning,
PEOPLE EATING LUNCH AHEAD
. Rather, the uncertainty of the space and its human-scaled geometry dictate the behavior. There is an element of mystery and surprise, one that Charles Dickens remarked upon over a century before in
Sketches by Boz:
“The stranger who finds himself in the Dials for the first time…at the entrance of Seven obscure passages, uncertain which to take, will see enough around him to keep his curiosity awake for no inconsiderable time.”
That awakened curiosity is still present today, and for drivers and pedestrians it translates into a need to pay attention. Even as a pedestrian navigating the Dials, I found myself confused. Which of the seven streets led to the Tube? If only there was a sign to point the way. Instead I paused, looked around, and decided to take the road that had the most people on it. This was the social world, and I was relying on human instincts. My choice was correct, and I found the Tube.
One of Hans Monderman’s many interesting ideas about traffic was that it is a network not only in space but in time. What this means is that the farther we drive, the faster we expect to be able to go. “When I start at home, I drive very slowly,” he told me. “All my neighbors know me, they are part of my world, and I part of theirs, and it’s absolutely unacceptable that I speed in my own street. But after a few minutes, I’m a bit more anonymous, and the more anonymous I get, the more my foot goes down and I’m speeding more and more.” At the beginning of his trip, he was in the social world, and at the end of it, perhaps arriving in another village, he was as well. But what about the in-between? This was when he appreciated the traffic world, with all its signs and markings and safety measures and speeds. “When you want nice villages,” he noted, “you need freeways.”
But there is a problem with that in-between. Sometimes the roads on which people drive fast, as if they are the restricted-access highways of the traffic world, still have elements of the social world. People live near them, do their shopping on them, perhaps even have to cross them on foot. “I always say the road in-between is the most dangerous road,” Monderman remarked. “It’s not a highway, but it’s not a residential street. All these roads have the biggest accident problem. The road is often telling you this is a traffic system: We have organized everything around you for all your needs. But the same road is cutting as a knife through the social world. The traffic world and the social world are shouting at each other.”
One finds a striking example of this situation not in the Netherlands but in Orlando, Florida. Dan Burden is a widely acclaimed traffic guru who now works with the Orlando transportation planning firm Glatting Jackson. We were cruising down East Colonial Drive, which is the Orlando stretch of U.S. Highway 50, heading for Baldwin Park, a New Urbanist community built on a former naval base that Burden was eager to show me. Burden, famously known for his elaborate walruslike mustache, was newly clean-shaven (“It’s for charity,” he explained). As we drove, Burden gave a running commentary on the nature of the street, which bears a dubious distinction: One analysis found it to be the twelfth-deadliest road in America. (The deadliest road, according to another survey, is U.S. 19, also in Florida, a few hours away.)