Share the Road!

Posted by Bil on July 8, 2004 04:46 PM

Here's a fascinating article in Salon about rethinking the way we design our streets. (click through the ad to get a free day pass)

[T]he chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It's called "second generation" traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and -- of all subjects -- evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.

For the past 50 years, the American approach to traffic safety has been dominated by the "triple E" paradigm: engineering, enforcement and education. And yet, the idea of the street as a flexible community space is a provocative one in the United States, precisely because other "traditional" modes of transportation -- light rail, streetcars and bicycles -- are making a comeback in cities across the country. The shared-street concept is also intriguing for the way it challenges one of the fundamental tenets of American urban planning: that to create safe communities, you have to control them.

The article talks about success with this type of planning and muses about bringing 2G traffic ideas to the US. The author's experience, though, was in China, and promising installations of this system have only really been found in northern Europe, two regions with vastly different psychologies than Americans. Indeed, the article quotes a city traffic engineer from Portland, OR as saying "We live in a culture that gives so much value to the individual and the expression of that is how we act in a car." That is certainly true.

A problem the article does not take into account, however, is the nature of our built environment. This new thinking in "managed anarchy" is really only applicable to truly urban areas, which are in shrinking supply in the overly suburbanized US.

That said, there are important points in there, too. We could definitely benefit from some ideas of 2G traffic calming. Andres Duany (and maybe Jim Kunstler, I think) write about how our roads have been made more dangerous in the name of safety (for example, removing roadside trees so there are less things to hit actually encourages faster and more reckless driving). I know from experience that tighter streets are much less dangerous (and less stress-inducing) than wider ones.

From the three E's, we're really not doing too well. Engineering has proven to be counter-productive in many cases, enforcement is a butterfly in a hurricane, and education... well, I'll let you make your own conclusions on that one. I drive through a rotary/roundabout in Cranston many times a week, and I'd say only half of its users actually know the proper way to navigate the road there (though, as far as I've seen, there haven't been many accidents there!).

Implementing these ideas would certainly be tough, though. How do you test a new traffic structure, especially a counter-intuitive one, when safety is at stake? The key is certainly getting drivers and pedestrians to interact more, not less, but is that possible in our car-crazy, me-first road culture?

BONUS: Here's a scary example of what happens when pedestrians and scofflaws mix on our roads now.

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