Shared space doesn't really work except for places with very little traffic, and there only if the streets are small enough to make driving difficult and unpleasant. The Dutch model of providing safe, separated spaces for cycling and walking is a proven success.
Happens in St Petersburg Russia a lot. While there are road signs and markers, the only acknowledged rule of the road most of the time is "we go this direction on this side", and even that isnt always carefully followed.
Sometimes it's great and inow traffic times the flow is fine. Other times every intersection is an adventure to get through as cars pile into the middle hoping to get through. Lot of horns beeping and lots of swearing. Even worse if the traffic lights go out.
Maybe this works in certain conditions, but too many cars on the road just seems to cause chaos without something enforcing order.
(Many of the traffic jams are further complicated by Russian insurance policies when it comes to accidents in that you may compromise your version of the story if you move your vehicles before the police arrive. This means that an inconvenient accident in an intersection can stop traffic for a long ways until the police decide to arrive and write a report. )
A highly congested city is already suffering from a serious problem with detrimental consequences to pedestrians and cyclists. Making cycle lanes available just helps reduce those problems. You will still have congestion whatever you do. But having less capacity for cars could help deter people from making journeys that cause such a nuisance.
>deter people from making journeys that cause such a nuisance.
Connectivity and interaction is the whole reason we have cities. Urban planning that seeks to prevent trips ("transportation demand management") defeats the purpose of living near other humans. Why have cities at all, if you are going to design them to be isolating?
When it's easier and faster to navigate 50 miles between farms than 5 miles between urban neighborhoods, the city has thoroughly and catastrophically failed. I'm not surprised that this happens accidentally. But the idea we should deliberately make cities hostile to their residents' desires to get around just seems crazy.
The Dutch don't actually provide reasonably separated spaces in Amsterdam beyond the major wide roads. On the older streets (i.e., the ones you want to stroll along), it's basically mayhem with pedestrians in danger much of the time.
Copenhagen is much more "thorough" in this regard, but that's just because they have far fewer old streets. The fully separated, individual curbs between car, bicycle, and pedestrian works really well. It's just not "affordable" on old streets.
Don't look at Amsterdam's city centre as a representative example of traffic in our country. The number of tourists combined with a total disregard for traffic rules on the part of the natives makes for a rather uncivilized mix.
I don't know how true this is, but I find that Dutch and Belgian drivers seem to have much less regard for traffic laws than the Germans and UK drivers. Things like not cutting corners and indicating at roundabouts.
One big difference I notice is the amount of space that is between cars. Germans and UK drivers leave much bigger time gap than Belgians / Dutch.
I spent 10 years driving in the UK and now 7 years driving in Belgium and occasionally across to Germany / Holland
The 'shared space' concept is actually Dutch in origin (traffic engineer Hans Monderman), and is still used here in a lot of places. The concept seems to work rather well in villages where a primary thoroughfare (essentially two grades below a highway) passes through the village centre. The lack of a well-defined kerb makes motorists adjust their behaviour in a good way.
That said, shared spaces are overused in the Netherlands as well; especially in busy places that have plenty of pedestrians and an ongoing bicycle route. In my experience (as a cyclist and pedestrian) removing the lines and kerbs doesn't make cyclists adjust their speed and pedestrians more aware of their surroundings; it creates an arena where the strongest contender wins.
There is a disturbing trend in Dutch urban planning where demarcations and clear traffic rules are being eschewed in favour of laissez-faire shared spaces where you are mostly on your own as a participant in traffic, and where acting like an ass-hole is the most effective and safe strategy.
It depends on your definition of 'very little traffic', the Poynton Plan reckons on about 900 vehicles per hour [0].
> Park Lane also carries significant traffic flows
(some 10,500 vehicles per 12-hour day), much of
which is local traffic, and cannot be diverted via ot
her existing routes
I'd be very curious to see these discussions also take into account the road situation in countries other than those in Europe and the US. I've heard many a tale of driving conditions in—just for example—the dense urban areas of India that would turn this assumption completely on its head.
I suspect this works in a homogeneous culture where everyone has the same concepts of queues, taking turns, and aversion to line cutting. But in a heterogenous culture with a mix of people who prioritize self over taking turns and regularly ignore queues, this would quickly become a disaster.
You just described Kathmandu perfectly. Very few traffic lights were ever installed, they never really worked due to load shedding. Now with the load shedding in the city removed these lights only flash orange (sometimes).
Recently there has been a clampdown on people skipping queues, driving on the wrong side of the road (all positive efforts).
My two rules, same as where I learned to drive on a farm in Ireland; avoid hitting people, avoid hitting cows. Everything else will take care of themselves (cars, bikes, buses, trucks).
According to multiple friends that are from Kathmandu, pedestrians are more like to be killed that injured from cars. The reason is if a driver disables a pedestrian they need to support them financially for life. But if they kill them they have a fine with a maximum limit. So it’s often less expensive to kill someone that to injur them. Therefore there are numerous cases of drivers hitting a pedestrian, not killing them, then running them down again to make sure they die.
Oh, that idea. It got a lot of press in the 1990s when some town in France tried it. When Redwood City rebuilt their downtown, "Theater Way", in front of the movie theaters, was built with a curb on one side and no curb on the other.[1] Restaurants along both sides were allowed to expand onto the sidewalk and beyond.
The result was a mess. Cars too close to restaurant tables with no barrier. Heavy planters were put in place. That helped some. Finally, traffic was blocked off at both ends, and it became entirely a pedestrian area. As a pedestrian area, it works well. But no one can be dropped off right in front of the theater.
I wonder to what extent the reduced accident rate is due to change rather than 'Shared Space' being a better design. The same thing happened when Sweden switched from driving on the left side of the road to the right. Accident rates initially dropped but soon rebounded to prior levels.[1]
The scheme has only been going for two years, so yes it would be worth checking again after say 10 years.
But there are significant differences. From the Wikipedia article:
> Indeed, fatal car-to-car and car-to-pedestrian accidents dropped sharply as a result, and the number of motor insurance claims went down by 40%.
> These initial improvements did not last, however. The number of motor insurance claims returned to 'normal' over the next six weeks and, by 1969, the accident rates were back to the levels seen before the change.
So those results returned to normal over 6 weeks, but the shared spaces were measured over 2 years. Also the changes were more drastic. 36 accidents over 4 years (9 per year) vs 4 over 2 years (2 per year).
Right now it looks like they don't, but if the city wanted to it could. I visited seoul last year and one of the coolest things for me was that in most of the city they had a small yellow rubber path along most all sidewalks, roads, and metro stations; the path had several small ridges which ran parallel to the path.
At first my partner and I had no idea why these were here until we were taking a walk on Namsan mountain and saw some blind folk strolling freely along the roads using the path to navigate with their walking sticks. It was incredible once we realized the extent of this network and how much freedom it added for those with vision problems. Still not sure if that is why the paths were there but their use by citizens was clear.
I dont know if it would help in a free-for-all space like this, but cities could help their citizens with disabilities better.
The Poynton example seems strange. Maybe the signs as such were removed, but what they did was basically to convert from an intersection with lights to a roundabout. The roundabout clearly exists, even if the sign doesn't. People in the UK know very well how to default to that behaviour, so I wouldn't say it's really a shared space.
> The concept is that the absence of separation will make everyone more cautious — so commuters slow down, make eye contact, and negotiate.
That's a part of town that I think I'd just avoid when possible, and hate when I couldn't avoid it. It sounds confusing and nerve-wracking. Most people are reasonable. The rest are terrifying, when they're in a car and you're on foot.
> Basically, solves the issue of traffic when the traffic is not an issue.
As per the stats they gave at 3:40 in video [0], in Ipswich it fell from 23 accidents in 3 years to 1 per year. So it is almost entirely solving the issue of accidents, which is the primary driver for installing them.
Once you get down to 1 per year you can start to investigate individual accidents more thoroughly and put in specific smaller scale fixes.
Here in Phnom Penh, for all intents and purposes there are no rules of the road. So there are no sidewalks. Sidewalks are for rich people to park their monster second-hand imported American gas guzzlers. Going up the wrong side in the wrong direction of the road? No problem. Do you want to do a U turn from slow lane on a 4 lane highway -- stopping all traffic to do so is the way to do it. What you find is that it's the 3% of assholes who make a mess for everyone else.
In Thailand people follow the rules a bit more, but they drive recklessly at insane speeds. If you're a teenager, it's not cool to use headlights at night and the first thing you do is remove your mirrors, which no one uses anyway....
But if you go over the border into Laos there are no rules there either, but traffic is completely different from Thailand or Cambodia. People drive slowly, patiently and politely. Lao drivers even put the Japanese to shame and that's a pretty high bar. Laos is a very laid back place. It's too much effort for most people to not do otherwise.
Over the last twenty years I've seen things changing in both mainland China and in Thailand. People are slowly internalizing the rules of the road and following them more with each new generation. You stay in your lane, and your side of the road. You don't run stop signs. You wait for the traffic light to chain to green (or blue in Japan) before you cross a road.
What it comes down to is that rules of the road and road behavior is a collective body of knowledge that takes time to develop in a society. Once that knowledge has been internalized and becomes the cultural norm, then getting rid of traffic signs can work. But there is a learning curve to master that body of knowledge and a correspondingly greater responsibility that goes with it.
If you look across Europe where most nations have had as much time as the other to learn the rules (which is now about 100 years), there are still big differences.
Cue the difference between German, Austrian, and Hungarian drivers.
Germans: can be very aggressive at times. Austrians, only if you're in the wrong lane. Hungarians: fear for your life if you ever try to overtake someone ..
Some of this is propagation of cultural myths/stereotypes. In a country of millions of people there will be millions of people that don't conform to these blanket statements.
In the US, states and cities have their own driving stereotypes that don't fit neatly into an easily summarized national driving style.
Cars and the internal combustion engine coupled with easy finance is the problem. Cars as we have them today have to go and the new self-driving robot cars powered on electricity really do have to take over soon.
I can go out and spend £££ hiring a fancy car today and spend the next three years crawling around town looking for somewhere to park the thing, spewing fumes into the faces of the kids going to school. So long as I pay the taxes nobody is going to complain about the noise and pollution.
Is it not possible for at least one country on planet earth to restrict the total number of ICE cars? If you had to scrap a car to buy a new car then the total number of cars would not go up, the roads would not get any heavier for people who already have a car so there is self interest for everyone. New electric self-driving options could cater for young people who do not already own cars.
Coupled with this there could be a reduction in on-street parking, so you can then have roads that can be safe for cyclists and not lined with tin boxes on each side.
I too wish that we could basically get all amateur drivers off the roads and replace them with with automated electric cars.
But there are problems. One of the issues with self driving cars is that traffic will probably go up because all elderly people (as well as disabled) can now buy a self driving car.
Cars are a major source of freedom for people, so trying to restrict what you can do with them is going to be political suicide.
One of the things I thought about was only allowing professional (i.e. taxi, bus, lorry) and automatic cars on motorways. This should reduce accidents on motorways to almost zero which certainly here in Belgium is a massive cause of economic loss through time wasted stuck in traffic. But even this I doubt is possible. You'd have to have some massively expensive / privacy invading system to police it.
Belgium has what I consider a very bad system of priority from the right. Often what this means is that they just don't bother to put in any signs on junctions where they can't be bothered. Then who ever comes from the right has priority.
The problem is that this is similar to having a mini roundabout (which are fairly common in the UK), but there as with regular roundabouts in Belgium the priority is from the left.
Further this is made worse by what seems to be very little desire of the Belgian drivers to consistently follow the law. So some police will use priority from the right, some won't. Some drivers are very agressive with it some aren't. Some look some don't.
Some junctions have had the lines fade, so it looks like there is no preference but in fact there is.
On some roads you have a straight wide road and a small street from the right that has priority.
Personally I find all this confusion just makes driving far more stressful than it is compared to the UK. There every junction (except for this 'shared spaces') are all clearly marked.
There is also a big difference in the UK that, from what I have seen, the drivers there follow the rules much better. But I suspect some of this comes down to the extra frustration that the average Belgian driver has to go through.
Oh, so this explains one of the worst intersections in Berlin. I always wondered, why there were no street signs etc. at Checkpoint Charlie, one of the biggest tourist attractions here. After reading/watching the article and researching it online, it seems that it was converted into a "shared space" in 2014/2015, shortly before I moved to Berlin.
It might be just a bad implementation of the concept because you have a little vision into the other streets at the intersection, or because it is such a crowded space at any time, but the status quo is utter chaos. I've personally seen many near-accidents there, and I go out of my way to avoid it.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, there were no signs, signals, or lane markers. It was a true shared space with cars, pedestrians, and even horses, since cars were so new. However, over many generations, safety concerns caused our traffic system to evolve in what we have today.
Rapidly going back to the original anarchy may have an initial success due to the novelty of it, but I think we should not give up on the system that has evolved successfully over time.
Also, we are about to embark on a fundamental redesign of our traffic system with autonomous vehicles, so maybe we should wait and see.
47 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 85.0 ms ] threadSometimes it's great and inow traffic times the flow is fine. Other times every intersection is an adventure to get through as cars pile into the middle hoping to get through. Lot of horns beeping and lots of swearing. Even worse if the traffic lights go out.
Maybe this works in certain conditions, but too many cars on the road just seems to cause chaos without something enforcing order.
(Many of the traffic jams are further complicated by Russian insurance policies when it comes to accidents in that you may compromise your version of the story if you move your vehicles before the police arrive. This means that an inconvenient accident in an intersection can stop traffic for a long ways until the police decide to arrive and write a report. )
Connectivity and interaction is the whole reason we have cities. Urban planning that seeks to prevent trips ("transportation demand management") defeats the purpose of living near other humans. Why have cities at all, if you are going to design them to be isolating?
When it's easier and faster to navigate 50 miles between farms than 5 miles between urban neighborhoods, the city has thoroughly and catastrophically failed. I'm not surprised that this happens accidentally. But the idea we should deliberately make cities hostile to their residents' desires to get around just seems crazy.
Copenhagen is much more "thorough" in this regard, but that's just because they have far fewer old streets. The fully separated, individual curbs between car, bicycle, and pedestrian works really well. It's just not "affordable" on old streets.
One big difference I notice is the amount of space that is between cars. Germans and UK drivers leave much bigger time gap than Belgians / Dutch.
I spent 10 years driving in the UK and now 7 years driving in Belgium and occasionally across to Germany / Holland
I guess that cars can't go as fast on the older smaller streets.
That said, shared spaces are overused in the Netherlands as well; especially in busy places that have plenty of pedestrians and an ongoing bicycle route. In my experience (as a cyclist and pedestrian) removing the lines and kerbs doesn't make cyclists adjust their speed and pedestrians more aware of their surroundings; it creates an arena where the strongest contender wins.
There is a disturbing trend in Dutch urban planning where demarcations and clear traffic rules are being eschewed in favour of laissez-faire shared spaces where you are mostly on your own as a participant in traffic, and where acting like an ass-hole is the most effective and safe strategy.
> Park Lane also carries significant traffic flows (some 10,500 vehicles per 12-hour day), much of which is local traffic, and cannot be diverted via ot her existing routes
[0]: http://www.hamilton-baillie.co.uk/_files/_projects/100-2.pdf
Recently there has been a clampdown on people skipping queues, driving on the wrong side of the road (all positive efforts).
My two rules, same as where I learned to drive on a farm in Ireland; avoid hitting people, avoid hitting cows. Everything else will take care of themselves (cars, bikes, buses, trucks).
[0]: https://www.debretts.com/debretts-a-to-z/q/queueing/
The result was a mess. Cars too close to restaurant tables with no barrier. Heavy planters were put in place. That helped some. Finally, traffic was blocked off at both ends, and it became entirely a pedestrian area. As a pedestrian area, it works well. But no one can be dropped off right in front of the theater.
[1] http://citydesigncollective.com/urban-design-services/street...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H
But there are significant differences. From the Wikipedia article:
> Indeed, fatal car-to-car and car-to-pedestrian accidents dropped sharply as a result, and the number of motor insurance claims went down by 40%.
> These initial improvements did not last, however. The number of motor insurance claims returned to 'normal' over the next six weeks and, by 1969, the accident rates were back to the levels seen before the change.
So those results returned to normal over 6 weeks, but the shared spaces were measured over 2 years. Also the changes were more drastic. 36 accidents over 4 years (9 per year) vs 4 over 2 years (2 per year).
At first my partner and I had no idea why these were here until we were taking a walk on Namsan mountain and saw some blind folk strolling freely along the roads using the path to navigate with their walking sticks. It was incredible once we realized the extent of this network and how much freedom it added for those with vision problems. Still not sure if that is why the paths were there but their use by citizens was clear.
I dont know if it would help in a free-for-all space like this, but cities could help their citizens with disabilities better.
https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/09/exhibition-road-accident-r...
Who would have thought?
That's a part of town that I think I'd just avoid when possible, and hate when I couldn't avoid it. It sounds confusing and nerve-wracking. Most people are reasonable. The rest are terrifying, when they're in a car and you're on foot.
Basically, solves the issue of traffic when the traffic is not an issue.
As per the stats they gave at 3:40 in video [0], in Ipswich it fell from 23 accidents in 3 years to 1 per year. So it is almost entirely solving the issue of accidents, which is the primary driver for installing them.
Once you get down to 1 per year you can start to investigate individual accidents more thoroughly and put in specific smaller scale fixes.
[0]: https://youtu.be/VUbsFtLkGN8?t=3m40s
In Thailand people follow the rules a bit more, but they drive recklessly at insane speeds. If you're a teenager, it's not cool to use headlights at night and the first thing you do is remove your mirrors, which no one uses anyway....
But if you go over the border into Laos there are no rules there either, but traffic is completely different from Thailand or Cambodia. People drive slowly, patiently and politely. Lao drivers even put the Japanese to shame and that's a pretty high bar. Laos is a very laid back place. It's too much effort for most people to not do otherwise.
Over the last twenty years I've seen things changing in both mainland China and in Thailand. People are slowly internalizing the rules of the road and following them more with each new generation. You stay in your lane, and your side of the road. You don't run stop signs. You wait for the traffic light to chain to green (or blue in Japan) before you cross a road.
What it comes down to is that rules of the road and road behavior is a collective body of knowledge that takes time to develop in a society. Once that knowledge has been internalized and becomes the cultural norm, then getting rid of traffic signs can work. But there is a learning curve to master that body of knowledge and a correspondingly greater responsibility that goes with it.
Germans: can be very aggressive at times. Austrians, only if you're in the wrong lane. Hungarians: fear for your life if you ever try to overtake someone ..
In the US, states and cities have their own driving stereotypes that don't fit neatly into an easily summarized national driving style.
You have just neatly summarized all of the recorded history of humanity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUfsB2siCOI
Skip to about 9:00
I can go out and spend £££ hiring a fancy car today and spend the next three years crawling around town looking for somewhere to park the thing, spewing fumes into the faces of the kids going to school. So long as I pay the taxes nobody is going to complain about the noise and pollution.
Is it not possible for at least one country on planet earth to restrict the total number of ICE cars? If you had to scrap a car to buy a new car then the total number of cars would not go up, the roads would not get any heavier for people who already have a car so there is self interest for everyone. New electric self-driving options could cater for young people who do not already own cars.
Coupled with this there could be a reduction in on-street parking, so you can then have roads that can be safe for cyclists and not lined with tin boxes on each side.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41730778
But there are problems. One of the issues with self driving cars is that traffic will probably go up because all elderly people (as well as disabled) can now buy a self driving car.
Cars are a major source of freedom for people, so trying to restrict what you can do with them is going to be political suicide.
One of the things I thought about was only allowing professional (i.e. taxi, bus, lorry) and automatic cars on motorways. This should reduce accidents on motorways to almost zero which certainly here in Belgium is a massive cause of economic loss through time wasted stuck in traffic. But even this I doubt is possible. You'd have to have some massively expensive / privacy invading system to police it.
The problem is that this is similar to having a mini roundabout (which are fairly common in the UK), but there as with regular roundabouts in Belgium the priority is from the left.
Further this is made worse by what seems to be very little desire of the Belgian drivers to consistently follow the law. So some police will use priority from the right, some won't. Some drivers are very agressive with it some aren't. Some look some don't.
Some junctions have had the lines fade, so it looks like there is no preference but in fact there is.
On some roads you have a straight wide road and a small street from the right that has priority.
Personally I find all this confusion just makes driving far more stressful than it is compared to the UK. There every junction (except for this 'shared spaces') are all clearly marked.
There is also a big difference in the UK that, from what I have seen, the drivers there follow the rules much better. But I suspect some of this comes down to the extra frustration that the average Belgian driver has to go through.
Where I live, we are moving steadily in the "fuck you, I'm special" direction, so this isn't likely to work until we have autonomous vehicles.
It might be just a bad implementation of the concept because you have a little vision into the other streets at the intersection, or because it is such a crowded space at any time, but the status quo is utter chaos. I've personally seen many near-accidents there, and I go out of my way to avoid it.
Rapidly going back to the original anarchy may have an initial success due to the novelty of it, but I think we should not give up on the system that has evolved successfully over time.
Also, we are about to embark on a fundamental redesign of our traffic system with autonomous vehicles, so maybe we should wait and see.