What Happens If You Remove All The Traffic Signs From A City?
August 25th, 2008 Posted in Traffic Calming, Traffic Congestion
There’s an interesting article over at The Wilson Quarterly about a traffic engineer with some unique, counterintuitive ideas on how to make driving more safe and enjoyable.
Here’s an excerpt:
In the last few years, however, one traffic engineer did achieve a measure of global celebrity, known, if not exactly by name, then by his ideas. His name was Hans Monderman. The idea that made Monderman, who died of cancer in January at the age of 62, most famous is that traditional traffic safety infrastructure—warning signs, traffic lights, metal railings, curbs, painted lines, speed bumps, and so on—is not only often unnecessary, but can endanger those it is meant to protect.
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.
If that piques your interest, you may want to check out the full article.
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10 Responses to “What Happens If You Remove All The Traffic Signs From A City?”
By Highway on Sep 3, 2008
But that’s nowhere close to a ‘logical conclusion’. That’s an absurd leap, and the first half of your paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with the second. You have not show in any way how the removal of excessive traffic controls can ACTUALLY further the goals of anti-transportation planners. You just keep insisting that this is the case.
The point of the article is to show that perhaps the ‘century of safety research by traffic engineers’ is not nearly as useful or ’safe’ as roadways should be. Its point is that the layering of safety measure upon safety measure upon safety measure has *passed* a point of diminishing returns and is actually CONTRIBUTING to the unsafe practices of drivers, as they reduce their attention spent on the act of driving.
The goal is to *actually* make the roadways safer. And if a better way to do it is to not throw up dozens of confusing signs, treating drivers like brain-dead morons while confusing them beyond comprehension, then that way should get support. Blind opposition just because you think there isn’t enough pavement in the world is a non-sequiter. I love to see new roads designed and built, but I also know the goal of those roads is to get people from here to there in a timely and, most important of all, safe manner.
By Tom McCarey on Sep 3, 2008
The most extreme version of traffic calming comes from the Netherlands, where a planner named Hans Monderman proposes to make streets safe by making them as dangerous as possible. He modifies urban streets by removing all safety devices, including signs, stripes, signals, and even the curbs separating pedestrians from automobiles. By taking the knife-to-the-heart theory of traffic safety to its logical conclusion, Monderman’s ideas undo a century of safety research by traffic engineers. They are just idiotic enough that some American planners are likely to make similar proposals soon. Central planners are tyrant elitists who believe that ordinary people have too much freedom, and their mission is to incrementally abridge as much freedom as they deem necessary for the “good” of society. They, of course, will have the cars they want, and be free to go where and when they want without being asked for their papers.
Tom McCarey
By Highway on Sep 2, 2008
Tom, since you seem to have convinced yourself that you are right, that any attempt at improvement in traffic flow is actually a stalking horse for ’smart growth’ or whatever bogeyman concept you don’t like, I don’t expect to convince you.
But for everyone else, realize that the primary use of this traffic control paradigm is in already developed areas, with areas of traffic that were not planned by system, and do not work in either an interconnected or synergistic way. Additionally, these areas have layer upon layer upon layer of legacy traffic controls that were added in to try to ‘fix’ some problem that was identified, instead of going back and starting over.
Yes, it’s supposed to make driving uncomfortable. It’s supposed to make people THINK while they’re on the road, not allow them to believe they can zone out, protected by signage and channelization. But by doing this, it makes most drivers more aware, and reduces accidents and injuries, and increases actual throughput.
By Tom McCarey on Aug 28, 2008
Highway-
It doesn’t work like that. There may be fewer accidents, but the point of this tactic is to make driving so unpleasant and inconvenient that people will walk, bike, or transit–the goal of “smart growth.” “SG” is Soviet-style central planning and control, not the way people want to live, and is killing freedom in the US.
Tom McCarey
By Highway on Aug 28, 2008
Tom Mccarey, perhaps you missed the part where there was more throughput, less delay, and fewer accidents when this paradigm was applied to suitable locations.
The idea behind this is not to ‘impede traffic’. It’s to reduce the comfort level of all people who interact on the road, so they pay more attention to what they are doing. It’s a way to hopefully reverse our trend of trying to “Over-Law” everything so that we try to remove all judgment, which cannot be accomplished, and let people drive and interact with the other road users more safely.
Not everything is about transit or ’smart growth’.
By Tom Mccarey on Aug 28, 2008
This is a new tactic that the anti-automobile gang including “smart growth” urban engineers are using to impede traffic and make it more difficult to get around, with the goal of eliminating cars altogether.
What is needed is more road capacity engineered for more efficient travel. The US will never have, and doesn’t want, the type of public transit that the “smart growth” pipedreamers and the radical greens envision. Unless we fight against these people we will soon lose the freedom to drive where, when, and what we want.
Check with http://www.americandreamcoalition.org for related information.
Tom McCarey
By Hubcap on Aug 26, 2008
One of my favorites I saw in South FL:
“Please move disabled vehicles from traffic lanes”
Aw hell! I was just gonna put the pink under the wiper and walk away…
By Brian on Aug 26, 2008
I once saw a show on a town (or village) that decided to eliminate all traffic markers, including painted markers and let drivers and bikers figure it all out for themselves. Not sure where this town was, but I thought it was in the US somewhere. It was an interesting experiment, I seem to remember the show indicating that traffic accidents were down as a result.
By K on Aug 26, 2008
I love those ones, hehe. I always drive the state maximum through those areas figuring a cop has no way of telling me that I knew what the speedlimit was. (Though technically it means that the prior speed limit is now back in effect. Most likely this means you just drove through a crappy little town that you are done with in a blink of an eye)
By Seth on Aug 25, 2008
This could be a fun thread — listing useless road signs.
I nominate the ones that point out that the speed limit behind you is no longer in effect. They say something like ‘end 40 mph speed limit’. They don’t tell you the limit of the stretch of road you just entered, just that the old limit doesn’t apply.