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November 19, 2006
Rules make us rulebreakers
According to Der Spiegel, the Dutch town of Drachten has gotten rid of 16 traffic lights and converted the other two to roundabouts (traffic circles).
Leave it to the Germans Dutch to discover that in chaos there is order.
A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende.
The utopia has already become a reality in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Western Frisia. A sign by the entrance to the small town (population 1,000) reads "Verkeersbordvrij" -- "free of traffic signs." Cars bumble unhurriedly over precision-trimmed granite cobblestones. Stop signs and direction signs are nowhere to be seen. There are neither parking meters nor stopping restrictions. There aren't even any lines painted on the streets.
Of course, I wonder how many motorists have been killed trying to sound out "Verkeersborvrij" on the sign as they drove into Makkinga?
There's some interesting psychology at work here, according the the English version of the article from Der Spiegel (which is not the German version of the Spiegel Catalog -- it's so confusing!).
"The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior," says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project's co-founders. "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles."
Sounds like the "traffic guru" has been spending too much time in Amsterdam's famed hash bars.
Monderman could be on to something. [Or on something -- Mike] Germany has 648 valid traffic symbols. The inner cities are crowded with a colorful thicket of metal signs. Don't park over here, watch out for passing deer over there, make sure you don't skid. The forest of signs is growing ever denser. Some 20 million traffic signs have already been set up all over the country.
Psychologists have long revealed the senselessness of such exaggerated regulation. About 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by drivers. What's more, the glut of prohibitions is tantamount to treating the driver like a child and it also foments resentment. He may stop in front of the crosswalk, but that only makes him feel justified in preventing pedestrians from crossing the street on every other occasion. Every traffic light baits him with the promise of making it over the crossing while the light is still yellow.
The result is that drivers find themselves enclosed by a corset of prescriptions, so that they develop a kind of tunnel vision: They're constantly in search of their own advantage, and their good manners go out the window.
The new traffic model's advocates believe the only way out of this vicious circle is to give drivers more liberty and encourage them to take responsibility for themselves. They demand streets like those during the Middle Ages, when horse-drawn chariots, handcarts and people scurried about in a completely unregulated fashion. The new model's proponents envision today's drivers and pedestrians blending into a colorful and peaceful traffic stream.
It may sound like chaos, but it's only the lesson drawn from one of the insights of traffic psychology: Drivers will force the accelerator down ruthlessly only in situations where everything has been fully regulated. Where the situation is unclear, they're forced to drive more carefully and cautiously.
Why do I suspect that the moment all traffic rules are suspended in Germany, traffic will grind to a panic-stricken halt?
I also have a hard time believing that it's the signage that unleashes the inner traffic id; the silent motion pictures of Manhattan street life from the earliest days of the 20th Century reveal that the crazed New York-style of aggressive driving existed when Model Ts and horse and buggies shared Gotham's relatively unregulated cobblestone streets.
It also marks a return to one of the earliest innovations in trafic control: the traffic circle. Before the days of traffic lights, engineers used the round roadways to blend traffic from different directions, cars joining the whirling mass, circling until they found an opening through which a motorist could move onto his intended route.
They're much more common on the East Coast of the United States, where urban planning was more urgent in the early days of the auto. When I got my licence in New Jersey, I had a grand time navigating some white-knuckle traffic circles down Trenton way.
In recent years, more and more of the traffic circles have been eliminated, replaced by computer-controlled and timed traffic lights, but apparently it's back to the future in the old country.
I'm interested in how the experiment turns out, so long as they try it first.
Posted by Mike Lief at November 19, 2006 07:02 PM
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