BIKE: Food for thought on traffic controls

[Thorne]

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/05/20/traffic_design/index.html

URL above is for an interesting article on "second generation traffic calming"
which essentially is a call for reduced speed and increased interactivity
between autos, cycles, and pedestrians achieved by reducing traffic controls
(signs, stripes, bumps, or what, though traffic cirlces seem to be considered
appropriate measures).  I've never thought about departing from the status quo
so far as suggested by some in the article, but I find the thinking here
reinforces my experience riding with and without segregated cycling facilities
and with and without painted stripes for bike lanes (I prefer without in both
cases).  I advocate following the rules of the road as an aid to ensuring
safety (through predictability--and the practice is backed up by real-world
accident stats), but note that a significant subset of cycling injuries have
bike paths and bike lanes partly to blame.  [See, for instance,
http://tomrevay.tripod.com/projects/MassBike/BikeLanes/index.htm ]  Just
maybe, stop lights and double yellow lines contribute to accidents as well. 
And, interestingly enough, the concepts may reduce congestion as well (increas
roadway capacity).  I'd be interested in learning more about these ideas.

Some tidbits (my regrets if the post is too long--you can just read it online
of course):
* * * 
<<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. >>
* * * 
<<Reversing decades of conventional wisdom on traffic engineering,
Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety and vehicular
capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, such as stop signs
and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into lanes. Without any clear
right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make
eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among
themselves when it is safe to proceed.>>
* * * 
<<The "self-reading street" has its roots in the Dutch "woonerf" design
principles that emerged in the 1970s. Blurring the boundary between street and
sidewalk, woonerfs combine innovative paving, landscaping and other urban
designs to allow for the integration of multiple functions in a single street,
so that pedestrians, cyclists and children playing share the road with
slow-moving cars. The pilot projects were so successful in fostering better
urban environments that the ideas spread rapidly to Belgium, France, Denmark
and Germany. In 1998, the British government adopted a "Home Zones" initiative
-- the woonerf equivalent -- as part of its national transportation policy. 

"What the early woonerf principles realized," says Hamilton-Baillie, "was that
there was a two-way interaction between people and traffic. It was a vicious
or, rather, a virtuous circle: The busier the streets are, the safer they
become. So once you drive people off the street, they become less safe." 

Contrast this approach with that of the United Kingdom and the United States,
where education campaigns from the 1960s onward were based on maintaining a
clear separation between the highway and the rest of the public realm.
Children were trained to modify their behavior and, under pain of death, to
stay out of the street. "But as soon as you emphasize separation of functions,
you have a more dangerous environment," says Hamilton-Baillie. "Because then
the driver sees that he or she has priority. And the child who forgets for a
moment and chases a ball across the street is a child in the wrong place." 

When it comes to reconfiguring streets as community spaces, ground zero is
once again Holland and Denmark, where planners are removing traffic lights in
some towns and cities, as well as white divider lines, sidewalks and speed
limits. Research has shown that fatality rates at busy intersections, where
two or three people were being killed every year, dropped to zero when
controls and boundaries were taken away. (This is food for thought among
alternative-transportation advocates in the United States, who extol northern
Europe as a model precisely because so much space in these countries is
dedicated to segregated pedestrian spaces and bike lanes.) >>
* * * 
<<The ramifications go beyond safety, says Hamilton-Baillie, to bear directly
on the interplay between speed, traffic controls and vehicle capacity.
Evidence from countries and cities that have introduced a design speed of 30
kilometers per hour (about 18.5 mph) -- as many of the European Union nations
are doing -- shows that slower speeds improve traffic flow and reduce
congestion. 

"This surprises many people, although mathematically it's not surprising,"
Hamilton-Baillie says. "The reason for this is that your speed of journey, the
ability of traffic to move smoothly through the built environment, depends on
performance of your intersections, not on your speed of flow between
intersections." And intersections, he says, work much more efficiently at
lower speeds. "At 30 miles per hour, you frequently need control systems like
traffic signals, which themselves mean that the intersection is not in use for
significant periods of time. Whereas at slower speeds vehicles can move much
more closely together and drivers can use eye contact to engage and make
decisions. So you get much higher capacity." >>