A few weeks ago Dave Snowden wrote a post on his blog about the Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, Monderman was a visionary. He was the first to recognize that the way we try to control traffic is counter productive. The signs – like he put it – are not there to prevent accidents, they are there to prevent legal ambiguity after an accident. In Monderman’s view a road should be made in such a way that signs are not necessary. The basic paradox is that the more you lines, traffic lights, traffic signs you add the less safety you get. One of the reasons is a false sense of safity: the drivers trust the signs and take less attention to the real traffic. He introduced the concept of shared space. In stead of heavy control, separating differcnt sorts of traffic (pedestrians, cyclists, cars) the road should be shared. This creates a safe behaviour. The picture shows an example of this in Brighton (picture from Wikipedia). Monderman recieved the innovation prize for this concept in 2006.
Tom Vanderbilt with his ‘Traffic – why we drive the way we drive’ shows strong evidence that a two-way road without a line in the middle is safer than a road with a clear line: the drivers adept their behaviour, are afraid to get to the wrong side of the road and take more attention to traffic. This is in my opinion a basic metaphor: the harder you try to control whatever you want to control, the less you succeed. The superior solution is a loose sort of control. Not a ‘laissez faire’ but a careful steering of emergent actions to a desired pattern.
Monderman designed roads and crossroads with a minimum of signs, all of them showed significant less accidents. Allthough his legecy is now growing, in Holland it is officially declared that his ideas are applicable ONLY within slow traffic zones. The allmighty Dutch ANWB just started a big campaign to bring the government to add MORE striping on the so called ‘ 80 Kilometer an hour’-road. This is an effort to claim back control. It resonates very well with the classical control mechanisms, always in favour of more signs. They use research to back up this policy and claim to be able to save hundreds of lives with addes striping. This is based on a case where new striping was added. The research made a classical mistake however, because not only the striping was changed, but on top of that the police started rigorous speed control with a dedicated team. It is more than likely that so called ’striping effect’ was nil in comparison to the other measures.
