Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Roads Gone Wild The December 7th issue of Wired magazine has an interesting article titled Roads Gone Wild by Tom McNichol that reminds me a lot of the spirit of agile software development. The article is about a new kind of traffic engineering advocated by Holland's Hans Monderman. And by traffic engineering we are talking about roads, sidewalks, interestions, etc, not TCP/IP. The article lead in starts: No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer. Another graphic has the title: How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation Step 1: Remove Signs - The architecture of the road, not signs and signals dictates traffic flow. Step 2: Install Art - The height of the fountain indicates how congested the interstate is. Step 3: Share the Spotlight - Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also the pedestrian areas. Step 4: Do it in the Road - Cafes extend to the edge of the street, further emphasizing the idea of shared space. Step 5: See Eye to Eye - Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction rather than commonly ignored signs. Step 6: Elimanate Curbs Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by texture and color. Some interesting quotes: * Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. ... To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something. To my mind it's much better to remove things. * Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behaviour - traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings - and in their place created a traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signlas telling drivers how fast to go, or curbs separating the street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ands and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver the intersection is utterly ambigious - and that the point. * The drivers slow to guage the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic flows smoothly. * Experts call it psychological traffic calming. * I think the future of transportation in our cities is slowing down the roads. When you try to speed things up, the system tends to fail, and then you are stuck with a design that moves traffic inefficiently and is hostile to pedestrians and human exchange. * The way you build a road affects far more than the movement of vehicles. It determines how drivers behave on it. * The central premise guiding American road design was that driving and walking were utterly incompatible modes of transport and the should be segragated as much as possible. * Traffic engineers viewed vehicle movement the same way a hydraulics engineer approaches water moving through a pipe - to increase flow make the pipe fatter. Roads signs rather than road architecture became the chief way to enforce behaviour. * The strict segragation of cars and people turned out to have unintended consequences on towns and cities. It's a great article. Much of the tone reminds me of agile software development. I had no idea this movement was taking place. I just thought there was one way to build a road system and didn't think much about the others ways a road system might work. comment[] 3:27:31 PM

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