The traffic engineer is Monderman. This article from Vanderbilt's work is about Monderman's theory about cars, driving, and the perception of time -- pretty much in line with Marxist analyses of the change in our perception of time from agrarian to industrialized world (though Monderman tends to come off as libertarian possibly communitarian) is a really good explanation of this idea that safer streets are born when you get rid of all the safety gizmos, signs, signals, and traffic calming devices. They are, he says, an invitation to stop thinking when you are driving. Like I said before, our suburban streets are designed as big rivers that carry you along. When you feel like that, of course you think you can put on make up, pay your bills, text, etc. You don't have to pay attention. But also, the more signs forbidding, the more likely you are to think, "No signs saying I can't pay my bills while driving."
The Traffic Guru
by Tom Vanderbilt
"In streets designed to safely handle the actions of the riskiest participants, everyone slips into riskier behavior. As he put it to me, "There are so many things that can be forbidden. The stranger thing is that we believe everything that isn't forbidden is allowed."
http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=1234
As I drove with Monderman through the northern Dutch province of Friesland several years ago, he repeatedly pointed out offending traffic signs. "Do you really think that no one would perceive there is a bridge over there?" he might ask, about a sign warning that a bridge was ahead. "Why explain it?" He would follow with a characteristic maxim: "When you treat people like idiots, they'll behave like idiots." Eventually he drove me to Makkinga, a small village at whose entrance stood a single sign. It welcomed visitors, noted a 30 kilometer-per-hour speed limit, then added: "Free of Traffic Signs." This was Monderman humor at its finest: a traffic sign announcing the absence of traffic signs. ...
As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn't struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic processstop, gothe movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.
A year after the change, the results of this "extreme makeover" were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersectionbuses spent less time waiting to get through, for examplebut there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using signalsof the electronic or hand varietymore often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman's ears. If they had not felt less secure, he said, he "would have changed it immediately."
Not surprisingly, these kinds of counterintuitive findings made news. But often, the reports reduced Monderman's theories to a simple libertarian dislike for regulation of any kind. Granted, he did occasionally hum this tune. "When government takes over the responsibility from citizens, the citizens can't develop their own values anymore," he told me. "So when you want people to develop their own values in how to cope with social interactions between people, you have to give them freedom." But his philosophy consisted of more than a simple dislike of constraints. He was questioning the entire way we think about traffic and its place in the landscape.
In several years of research for a book on traffic, I interviewed any number of engineers, but none, save Monderman, referred to Marcel Proust. In Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), Proust famously waxes lyrical on the ways the automobile changed our conception of time and space. When a driver says it will take only 35 minutes to travel by car from Quetteholme to La Raspelière, the narrator is moved to reflect: "Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with it. We express the difficulty that we have in getting to a place in a system of miles or kilometers which becomes false as soon as that difficulty decreases. Art is modified by it also, since a village which seemed to be in a different world from some other village becomes its neighbor in a landscape whose dimensions are altered." ...
Monderman believed that the best way to change the conception of timeand thereby to change people's behaviorwas to change the context. This simple insight was one of the foundations of his traffic revolution, which took root a decade before he remade Drachten. In the mid-1980s, Monderman, then a regional safety inspector for Friesland, was dispatched to the small village of Oudehaske to check the speed of car traffic through the town's center (two children had been fatally struck). Previously, Monderman, like any good Dutch traffic engineer, would have deployed, if not an actual traffic light, the tools of what is known as "traffic calming": speed bumps, warning signs, bollards, or any number of highly visible interventions.
But those solutions were falling out of favor with his superiors, because they were either ineffective or too expensive. At a loss, Monderman suggested to the villagers, who as it happens had hired a consultant to help improve the town's aesthetics, that Oudehaske simply be made to seem more "villagelike." The interventions were subtle. Signs were removed, curbs torn out, and the asphalt replaced with red paving brick, with two gray "gutters" on either side that were slightly curved but usable by cars. As Monderman noted, the road looked only five meters wide, "but had all the possibilities of six."
The results were striking. Without bumps or flashing warning signs, drivers slowed, so much so that Monderman's radar gun couldn't even register their speeds. Rather than clarity and segregation, he had created confusion and ambiguity. Unsure of what space belonged to them, drivers became more accommodating. Rather than give drivers a simple behavioral mandatesay, a speed limit sign or a speed bumphe had, through the new road design, subtly suggested the proper course of action. And he did something else. He used context to change behavior. He had made the main road look like a narrow lane in a village, not simply a traffic-way through some anonymous town.
What Proust, in his early modernist enthusiasm for the mobility afforded by the automobile, did not seem to foresee was that the ability to conquer distance would lead to the denigration of landscapes between the points of origin and destination, and that once the mass of society had acquired cars, those distances would feel more arduous to cross, thus increasing the pressure of time. As Wolfgang Sachs writes in For Love of the Automobile (1992), "The masters of space and time awaken to find themselves slaves of distance and haste."
And so places such as Oudehaske begin to be read less as villages than as something to be blown through on the way to some great elsewhere. Traffic engineers, in Monderman's view, helped to rewrite these places with their signs and other devices. "In the past in our villages," Monderman said, "you could read the street in the village as a good book." Signs advertising a school crossing were unnecessary, because the presence of a school and children was obvious. "When you removed all the things that made people know where they were, what they were a part of, and when you changed it into a uniform world," he argued, "then you have to explain things."
Traffic signs speak to our increased mobility, but also our loss of local knowledge. They are standardized fast food instead of local cuisine. For the past few decades, the geographer Denis Wood has intensively mapped his neighborhood, the Boylan Heights section of Raleigh, North Carolina, to show everything from the distribution of Halloween jack-o'-lanterns on people's porches to the light cast by streetlights. He noticed that the streets with the most signage were those that carried the most people through the neighborhood. "The signs were, by and large, not for locals," he said. Another map showed that the most emergency police calls came from those same streets, typically for crashes: The signs were not necessarily improving safety (though of course it could be argued that without signs there would have been even more accidents).
Monderman envisioned a dual universe. There was the "traffic world" of the highway, standardized, homogenous, made legible by simple instructions to be read at high speed. And there was the "social world," where people lived and interacted using human signals, at human speeds. The reason he didn't want traffic infrastructure in the center of Drachten or any number of other places was simple: "I don't want traffic behavior, I want social behavior." The social world had its limits; at some intersections in Drachten, Monderman said, he "wouldn't trust this solution." The removal of signs and other visual markings could only be done after careful study of conditions such as traffic volume, the geometry of the intersection, and the mix of cyclists and cars. It is precisely this delicate attention to context that Monderman felt many of his colleagues lacked in installing traffic controls in the first place: "I call them copy machines. They always do things by the book."
Monderman's work has inspired or been echoed by a growing number of projects that, in essence, try to replace the traffic world with the social world. His ideas, often under the guise of what is known as the "shared space" movement, have found their way in one form or another into a number of other towns across Europe, from Bohmte, Germany, where the town's leaders (after visiting Drachten) decided to scrap the lights and signs at its center, an increasingly busy artery for through traffic, to the "gossip square" in the Swedish town of Norrköping, where cars, bicycles, and pedestrians cross streams of traffic in a central plaza largely devoid of markings.
Despite Monderman's successes in places such as Makkinga and Drachten, skeptics have objected that while these arrangements are fine for small villages, they could never work in cities with heavy traffic. A project in London, undertaken a few years ago independently of Monderman, suggests otherwise. On Kensington High Street, a busy thoroughfare for pedestrians, bikes, and cars, local planners decided to spruce up the street and make it more attractive to shoppers by removing the metal railings that had been erected between the street and the sidewalk, as well as "street clutter," everything from signs to hatched marks on the roadway. None of these measures complied with Department for Transport standards. And yet, since the makeover there have been fewer accidents than before. Though more pedestrians now cross outside crosswalks, car speeds (the fundamental cause of traffic danger) have been reduced, precisely because the area now feels like it must be navigated carefully.
While Monderman addressed conferences and municipal governments in the United States on several occasions during his lifetime, his ideas have not been adopted here in any meaningful way. One reason is that the United States has yet to fully embrace even traditional traffic calming methods. Collectively, Americans are still trying to wrap their heads around the fact that roundabouts are safer (and generally move traffic more efficiently) than conventional signalized intersections.
If Monderman's ideas seem heretical to many in the United States, it's worth considering exactly who created the American system in the first place, and why. In Fighting Traffic, a fascinating history published earlier this year, Peter D. Norton documents how the automobile industry, in concert with self-proclaimed traffic experts, helped shift the debate on urban traffic safety during the 1920s. As motorization levels soared, measures such as "speed governors" on engines, a once popular idea, fell out of favor, and the urban street was redefined from a place with various uses to a channel for moving the most vehicular traffic as quickly as possible.
And this is what we got: an entire infrastructure of inner-city expressways and elevated pedestrian crossings, whose ethos of separation was adopted under the banner of safety but was meant to move cars through cities faster (and even that strategy backfired, as the available space quickly filled with new drivers).The traffic infrastructure was intended to make cities safer for pedestrians by removing them from the street; but in any vital city this was, of course, never possible. The illusion of safetyroads built so that, as one engineer put it, "accidents will be impossible"simply brought new dangers, and degraded the very qualities that made cities attractive: spontaneity, locality, interactions at human scales.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how long we have lived with this built ideology, Monderman's ideas encounter two common criticisms. The first is that measures that appeal to the better angels of our nature could never work in a country such as the United States, where drivers seem stubbornly reluctant to "share the road" even with other cars, much less pedestrians and cyclists, and the threat of a lawsuit hovers over the smallest traffic intervention. It is true that if a local government is to remove the signs from a busy intersection, and orchestrate the smooth movement of bicycles and cars through it, strong social norms must be in place. But norms can be influenced by context. Picture, for example, the improvised grass parking lots at county fairs: no stop signs, no speed limits, no markings of any kindmaybe just some kids with flags telling you where to go. But people, by and large, drive and walk in a cautious manner. There is no great epidemic of traffic fatalities at county fairs.
The other objection Monderman's ideas often meet is that people do act like idiots, and that, if anything, we need more separation, more safeguards, more rules. Standing with me near the roundabout in Drachten, Monderman noticed a driver speeding past. "There's a little part of society who don't accept rules, who don't accept social structures," he said. "It's not up to a traffic engineer to change it." A few weeks earlier, he said, a local 21-year-old who had just gotten his driver's license had died in a crash. "He used drugs, alcohol. There's not a street that can cope with that problem."
Traffic signs, for Monderman, were an invitation to stop thinking, to stop acting on one's own volition. In streets designed to safely handle the actions of the riskiest participants, everyone slips into riskier behavior.
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