Published Sunday, January 16, 2005, in the Toronto Star
"Naked streets": Sounds crazy but might just work
Entire towns in Europe have no traffic lights or signs, and they've never been safer
By Christopher Hutsul
Imagine, for a moment, a busy downtown intersection with no traffic lights, signs or sidewalks.
There are no markers on the ground, no speed bumps, no police officer conducting the flow of vehicles. There's not even a curb. Every element of traffic -- pedestrians, bikers and drivers -- is left to fend for itself.
Sounds like a recipe for chaos, right?
Wrong.
The implementation in a number of European communities of what some have dubbed "naked streets" has been hugely successful.
Urban planners in Holland, Germany and Denmark have experimented with this free-for-all approach to traffic management and have found it is safer than the traditional model, lowers trip times for drivers and is a boost for the businesses lining the roadway.
The idea is that by removing traffic lights, signage and sidewalks, drivers and pedestrians are forced to interact, make eye contact and adapt to the traffic instead of relying blindly on whether that little dot on the horizon is red or green.
Planners have found that without the conventional rules and regulations of the road in place, drivers tend to slow down, open their eyes to their environment and develop a "feel" for their surroundings.
In effect, every person using the street, be it an SUV owner or a kid with a wagon, becomes equal.
"You think this must be chaos, this must be dangerous, but then you watch it and use it for a while and realize that no, it's not," says traffic engineer Ben Hamilton-Baillie over the phone from London, England. "People are perfectly capable of manoeuvring around each other in the same way they are when they walk down the street."
Hamilton-Baillie has been working with the Borough of Kensington-Chelsea in London to develop a plan whereby the naked-street approach to traffic will be applied to Exhibition Rd., a busy stretch that features some of the city's most notable museums. Hamilton-Baillie says Kensington-Chelsea is just one of 20 districts in England that are seriously considering implementing the plan.
It makes sense, considering how well the plan has worked in other communities. About a year and a half ago, politicians in Drachten, Holland, a city of 55,000, stripped a crowded intersection to its pavement.
Planners built a grassy roundabout in the centre of the intersection for traffic to flow around and eliminated all signage and traffic lighting. The height of the curb separating the sidewalk and the road was reduced to an inch, becoming hardly perceptible.
Since then, only one collision has been recorded at the intersection: a light fender-bender.
"The traffic flow became much more fluent, and there are fewer queues," says Hans Monderman, a leading traffic engineer who helped draw up the plan. "The behaviour is negotiated through eye contact; traffic flows smoothly, and it looks nicer. And there have been no injuries yet at all."
Four years ago, a similar approach was taken in Christiansfeld, Denmark, at a high-traffic intersection that was plagued with traffic jams and pedestrian-related accidents. Since then, the number of fatal accidents has dropped from 3 per year to zero.
Positive reports have also emerged from a district in West Palm Beach, Fla., which recently adopted a similar plan.
The timing is good for this new way of thinking. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently projected that traffic incidents will become the third-leading cause of injury and disease globally by 2020 if the traditional approach to road safety goes unchanged.
Part of the thinking behind the new approach is that it encourages drivers to focus not on lights and signage but on what's happening around them, and to adjust their driving style accordingly. If the driver can clearly see that he or she is in a food market or club district, then it makes sense to slow down.
To that extent, Hamilton-Baillie says a road passing by an elementary school could incorporate some of the playground's surfaces and colours so that drivers clearly understand what kind of environment they are in.
They'll instinctively slow down because, as Hamilton-Baillie says, "nobody wants to kill a child."
Hamilton-Baillie and Monderman both believe that a conventional traffic system like Toronto's underestimates the ability of drivers and pedestrians to get by on their common sense. Hamilton-Baillie has observed that when a driver is plucked from his or her typical driving environment, or when there is some kind of traffic anomaly, they do an excellent job of adapting and behaving safely.
"People adapt to their circumstances with remarkable ease," he says. "If you ever come to a place where the traffic light has broken down, or if some unusual event is happening, like football fans pouring out of a stadium, drivers understand the rules have changed."
Hamilton-Baillie compares it to driving through a campsite.
"There are no signs, but it works fine," he says. "The reason is that there are no rules and you have to rely on your own faculties. As soon as there's human interest and human interaction, our speeds drop. We don't need traffic calming and cameras and enforcement of police and all that stuff ..."
In many developing countries, this kind of thinking is a way of life. At junctions in hectic places like Bali, Indonesia, buses, trucks, cyclists and scooter drivers tend to ignore the scant traffic signage and co-exist safely by behaving as though they are part of a traffic ecosystem.
What's more, there's been a positive spin-off for the businesses and cultural entities that line the areas. By encouraging drivers to slow down, traffic planners give streets a marketplace or town square feel.
This works in that, as a rule, places with slower moving traffic tend to exist on a more human scale and are more comfortable and inviting for pedestrians and cyclists.
Though we have no such district in Toronto, the phenomenon can be observed in places like Little Italy, Queen St. West and Kensington Market, where traffic flows more gently.
The City of Toronto, for its part, has no plans to undertake anything like London's Exhibition Rd. project.
"Here, when people have concerns about traffic, we add four-way stop signs, crossing routes and speed humps," says Les Kelman, the city's general manager of transportation. "We have a heavily regulated approach."
Kelman points out that we do, in fact, use some of the newer ideas, for example in our point-and-cross crosswalks.
"The idea of that is that by pointing, you bring the attention of the driver to you, establish eye contact, and the driver stops not because he sees a blinking red light or a mechanical flashing amber but because he has identified the presence of a person wanting to cross the road. It's the same principle."
Kelman says he is aware of Europe's shifting philosophies on traffic management. But, for now, he's waiting to see some long-term results.
Still, he wouldn't be opposed to such a proposition.
"We're always looking out for what other people are doing, but there's no guarantee that something like this would be applicable to the Toronto environment. I can't see it working on an arterial route, but certainly the principles are sound.
"If there were circumstances where we could define something like that, and the community was interested in some kind of pilot project, we wouldn't rule that out."
In the meantime, Torontonians will have to keep their eyes on the road, signs and traffic lights, and not on each other.