Instead of top down safety|Security In a different way

Roadways once belonged to pedestrians.

The space was utilized for markets, cattle, horse wagons, dancing, or conferences. Possibly contemporary days’ block celebrations, with their limited traffic, give a taste of what roadways once remained in regards to a place for people. Came the cars and trucks. Initially they were sluggish, however nevertheless exciting and they rapidly became fashionable. However, it was not long before the first collisions took place between cars and pedestrians. The requirement for road security and traffic management was born.

Early traffic engineers suggested that vehicles and pedestrians must be segregated. Roads for cars and trucks, pathways for everybody else. As cities and traffic grew, the techniques to make sure roadway security became more sophisticated. Interventions such as traffic control, cautions, prohibitions, instructions, speed limitations, circulation points, markings on the roadway, and speed bumps followed. However as more redundancy and barriers were contributed to the system, the complexity increased, making it ever harder to guarantee security.

Came Hans Monderman. This Dutch traffic engineer was offered the task of minimizing speeds on a particular street in the main parts of Drachten, a city in the north of Holland. Monderman’s thesis was that chauffeurs were speeding because they felt that the road came from them– that they had the access over pedestrians. In such a way, all the conventional safety steps eliminated the need for chauffeurs to use care, to look ahead, to interact with other people. Motorists could count on the system. Or a minimum of, that was what Monderman hypothesized about motorists.

The very first effort to change this, targeted at giving motorists a sense that the roadway did not come from them. Monderman planted flowers and plants around the streets. This to provide chauffeurs the impression they were driving in a garden, belonging to somebody else. The typical speed dropped with 10%.

This sufficed to encourage Monderman to keep exploring the idea. He went on to recommend an extreme approach: An overall elimination of whatever that generally kept automobiles and pedestrians separated. No signs, no kerbs, no traffic lights, no speed limits, no marking on the roadways. Simply a shared area. And this on a street which had more than 20,000 lorries each day.

Revoked of external ideas as to what was safe and not, motorists and pedestrians alike had to count on their own internal assessments of a scenario. The uncertainty triggered a more mindful driving design. But likewise, to fix conflicting scenarios, people needed to look for eye contact, to read individuals’s objectives from their behaviour, to arrange things out for themselves.

The result? Speeds dropped with 40%, the traffic flowed better, and while mishaps and injuries still take place, these are small occasions, with smaller sized consequences– events that are simpler to learn from.

Take a look at the video listed below to see the shared space in action. If you’re interested to find out more about how shared space is being utilized and rolled out throughout the world, you can learn more here.