The Traffic Guru

Abstract

An unassuming Dutch engineer showed that streets without signs can be safer than roads cluttered with arrows, painted lines, and lights. Are we ready to believe him? Hans Monderman certainly changed the landscape in the provincial city of Drachten, with the project that, in 2001, made his name. At the town center, in a crowded four-way intersection called the Laweiplein, Monderman removed not only the lights but virtually every other control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, traffic islands, and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout (a squareabout, in his words, because it really seemed more a town square than a traditional roundabout), marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by law. A year after the change, the results of this extreme makeover were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection--buses spent less time waiting to get through, for example--but there were half as many accidents, even though total car was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using signals--of the electronic or hand variety--more 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 and its place in the landscape.