What happens when you remove all traffic signs?

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Projecteer die benadering nu eens op de politieke wereld?

Groet / Cees

A Path to Road Safety With No Signposts
By SARAH LYALL

Published: January 22, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/22/international/europe/22monderman.html
DRACHTEN, The Netherlands

"I WANT to take you on a walk," said Hans Monderman, abruptly stopping
his car and striding - hatless, and nearly hairless - into the freezing
rain.

Like a naturalist conducting a tour of the jungle, he led the way to a
busy intersection in the center of town, where several odd things
immediately became clear. Not only was it virtually naked, stripped of
all lights, signs and road markings, but there was no division between
road and sidewalk. It was, basically, a bare brick square.

But in spite of the apparently anarchical layout, the traffic, a steady
stream of trucks, cars, buses, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians,
moved along fluidly and easily, as if directed by an invisible
conductor. When Mr. Monderman, a traffic engineer and the intersection's
proud designer, deliberately failed to check for oncoming traffic before
crossing the street, the drivers slowed for him. No one honked or
shouted rude words out of the window.

"Who has the right of way?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People
here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own
brains."

Used by some 20,000 drivers a day, the intersection is part of a
road-design revolution pioneered by the 59-year-old Mr. Monderman. His
work in Friesland, the district in northern Holland that takes in
Drachten, is increasingly seen as the way of the future in Europe.

His philosophy is simple, if counterintuitive.

To make communities safer and more appealing, Mr. Monderman argues, you
should first remove the traditional paraphernalia of their roads - the
traffic lights and speed signs; the signs exhorting drivers to stop,
slow down and merge; the center lines separating lanes from one another;
even the speed bumps, speed-limit signs, bicycle lanes and pedestrian
crossings. In his view, it is only when the road is made more dangerous,
when drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people,
that driving becomes safer.

"All those signs are saying to cars, 'This is your space, and we have
organized your behavior so that as long as you behave this way, nothing
can happen to you,' " Mr. Monderman said. "That is the wrong story."

The Drachten intersection is an example of the concept of "shared
space," a street where cars and pedestrians are equal, and the design
tells the driver what to do.

"It's a moving away from regulated, legislated traffic toward space
which, by the way it's designed and configured, makes it clear what sort
of behavior is anticipated," said Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a British
specialist in urban design and movement and a proponent of many of the
same concepts.

Highways, where the car is naturally king, are part of the "traffic
world" and another matter altogether. In Mr. Monderman's view,
shared-space schemes thrive only in conjunction with well-organized,
well-regulated highway systems.

Variations on the shared-space theme are being tried in Spain, Denmark,
Austria, Sweden and Britain, among other places. The European Union has
appointed a committee of experts, including Mr. Monderman, for a
Europe-wide study.

MR. MONDERMAN is a man on a mission. On a daylong automotive tour of
Friesland, he pointed out places he had improved, including a town where
he ripped out the sidewalks, signs and crossings and put in brick paving
on the central shopping street. An elderly woman crossed slowly in front
of him.

"This is social space, so when Grandma is coming, you stop, because
that's what normal, courteous human beings do," he said.

Planners and curious journalists are increasingly making pilgrimages to
meet Mr. Monderman, considered one of the field's great innovators,
although until a few years ago he was virtually unknown outside Holland.
Mr. Hamilton-Baillie, whose writings have helped bring Mr. Monderman's
work to wider attention, remembers with fondness his own first visit.

Mr. Monderman drove him to a small country road with cows in every
direction. Their presence was unnecessarily reinforced by a large,
standard-issue European traffic sign with a picture of a cow on it.

"He said: 'What do you expect to find here? Wallabies?' " Mr.
Hamilton-Baillie recalled. " 'They're treating you like you're a
complete idiot, and if people treat you like a complete idiot, you'll
act like one.'

"Here was someone who had rethought a lot of issues from complete
scratch. Essentially, what it means is a transfer of power and
responsibility from the state to the individual and the community."
	
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Dressed in a beige jacket and patterned shirt, with scruffy facial hair
and a stocky build, Mr. Monderman has the appearance of a football
hooligan but the temperament of an engineer, which indeed he trained to
be. His father was the headmaster of the primary school in their small
village; Hans liked to fiddle with machines. "I was always the guy who
repaired the TV sets in our village," he said.

He was working as a civil engineer building highways in the 1970's when
the Dutch government, alarmed at a sharp increase in traffic accidents,
set up a network of traffic-safety offices. Mr. Monderman was appointed
Friesland's traffic safety officer.

In residential communities, Mr. Monderman began narrowing the roads and
putting in design features like trees and flowers, red brick paving
stones and even fountains to discourage people from speeding, following
the principle now known as psychological traffic calming, where behavior
follows design.

He made his first nervous foray into shared space in a small village
whose residents were upset at its being used as a daily thoroughfare for
6,000 speeding cars. When he took away the signs, lights and sidewalks,
people drove more carefully. Within two weeks, speeds on the road had
dropped by more than half.

In fact, he said, there has never been a fatal accident on any of his roads.

Several early studies bear out his contention that shared spaces are
safer. In England, the district of Wiltshire found that removing the
center line from a stretch of road reduced drivers' speed without any
increase in accidents.

WHILE something of a libertarian, Mr. Monderman concedes that road
design can do only so much. It does not change the behavior, for
instance, of the 15 percent of drivers who will behave badly no matter
what the rules are. Nor are shared-space designs appropriate everywhere,
like major urban centers, but only in neighborhoods that meet particular
criteria.

Recently a group of well-to-do parents asked him to widen the two-lane
road leading to their children's school, saying it was too small to
accommodate what he derisively calls "their huge cars."

He refused, saying the fault was not with the road, but with the cars.
"They can't wait for each other to pass?" he asked. "I wouldn't
interfere with the right of people to buy the car they want, but nor
should the government have to solve the problems they make with their
choices."

Mr. Monderman's obsessions can cause friction at home. His wife hates
talking about road design. But work is his passion and his focus for as
many as 70 hours a week, despite quixotic promises to curtail his
projects and stay home on Fridays.

The current plan, instigated by Mrs. Monderman, is for him to retire in
a few years. But it is unclear what a man who begins crawling the walls
after three days at the beach ("If you want to go to a place without any
cultural aspect, go to the Grand Canaries," he grumbled) will do with
all that free time.

"The most important thing is being master of my own time, and then doing
things that we both enjoy," he said. "What are they? I don't know."

Cees Binkhorst wrote:
> REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
> Iemand die dus nadacht, ZONDER uit te gaan van de bestaande situatie ;)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Monderman
> http://www.sharedspace.eu/en/sitemap
>
> Jammer genoeg zijn die mensen met een lantaarntje nog niet eens te vinden.
>
> Groet / Cees
>
> Ernst Debets wrote:
>> REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>>
>> Cees,
>>
>> Klinkt een beetje als woonerven, maar daarvan hebben we er meer dan
>> 100 in
>> Nederland.
>>
>> Ernst Debets/
>> Zaanstad
>>
>> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
>> Van: owner-d66 at nic.surfnet.nl [mailto:owner-d66 at nic.surfnet.nl] Namens
>> Cees
>> Binkhorst
>> Verzonden: woensdag 31 maart 2010 23:20
>> Aan: Discussielijst over D66
>> Onderwerp: What happens when you remove all traffic signs?
>>
>> REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>>
>> Iemand een idee waar die 100 plekken zijn?
>>
>> Groet / Cees
>>
>> What happens when you remove all traffic signs? A German town finds out.
>>
>> In a counterintuitive approach to reducing car accidents and making
>> streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists, a German town has nixed
>> all traffic signs and traffic lights in the town center.
>>
>> http://www.csmonitor.com/
>> By Isabelle de Pommereau, Correspondent
>> posted March 31, 2010 at 3:45 pm EDT
>> Nieder-Erlenbach, Germany
>>
>> This unpretentious villagelike neighborhood in Frankfurt's
>> far-northern tip is known for the idyllic character of its old
>> half-timber homes and its views of rolling hills.
>>
>> Now it is a symbol of Germany's effort to rescue its streets from the
>> hegemony of cars and give more space to pedestrians and cyclists.
>>
>> To prod drivers to better share the road, in February Nieder-Erlenbach
>> got rid of all traffic signs and traffic lights in the town center. It
>> also erased marked crosswalks, leaving only one sign that says "common
>> street" and calling for a reduced speed of 30 km/h (18 m.p.h.). The
>> only other rule: "Always give way to the person on the right."
>>
>> Thus Main Street turned into a "naked" square shared equally by bikes,
>> pedestrians, cars, and trucks. With the change, Nieder-Erlenbach
>> adopted a radical traffic-management philosophy gaining popularity in
>> Europe. Pioneered by a Dutch engineer who thought towns were safer
>> with fewer rules, "shared space" envisions open surfaces on which
>> motorists and pedestrians can "negotiate" with one another by eye
>> contact, other signals, and a greater consideration for one another.
>>
>> Segregating cars and pedestrians was wrong, argued Hans Monderman, the
>> Dutch engineer who put in place more than 100 shared-space schemes in
>> the Netherlands. Prodded by European Union funding for shared-space
>> initiatives, seven European towns have launched shared-space
>> initiatives, including Ostend in Belgium, Ipswich in England, and the
>> small northern town of Bohme, Germany.
>>
>> But in Nieder-Erlenbach, not everybody is enthused. With no
>> indications as to where to park, drivers tend to park everywhere,
>> stalling traffic. Ulrike Markus finds the lack of sidewalks
>> unsettling. "Children don't know where they feel secure anymore," Ms.
>> Markus says.
>>
>> While it's too early to assess the impact of the changes on traffic
>> incidents, the no-traffic-sign rule is forcing everybody to behave
>> more responsibly, most residents agree. Juarita Lascarro says that the
>> changes have created a new atmosphere on the street. "We all have to
>> be careful all the time."
>>

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