Word: monderman
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...Signal Success Your article "Signal Failure," on the theory of Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman that streets are actually safer without road signs, reminded me of an incident that occurred in Auckland one extremely wet weekday in winter [Feb. 25]. At 8 a.m., at the height of the rush hour, there was a major blackout that affected the entire city and lasted about four hours. All traffic lights were out. Police on point duty manned four major intersections in the CBD, and one or two others were manned for brief periods by public-minded citizens who did not mind getting...
...summit, a streaming video showed cars, cyclists and pedestrians passing in a polite quadrille of nods and hand gestures through a Monderman-designed intersection in the Dutch town of Drachten. Since this "naked" junction was created in 2004, speeds through the town have slowed dramatically. Yet because there are no enforced waits at traffic lights, the crossing time has dropped from 50 to 30 seconds, while accidents have fallen from an average of nine a year to just...
...most of his career, Monderman's ideas inspired more admiration than emulation, but that's started to change. In 2004, the European Union set up a four-year funding project to foster the shared-space ethic in seven towns across Europe, including Oostende in Belgium and Ipswich in England. Last September, work finally began on the transformation of Bohmte, a town in northwestern Germany. Although its mayor, Klaus Goedejohann, says he expects "an aesthetic improvement, a higher quality of life and a better traffic situation" when the signs come down, so far all he has to show are some large...
...Monderman was convinced it could - and that one day it would. By his reckoning, a single-lane, shared-space junction could handle up to 25,000 vehicles a day. That's only a fraction of the 100,000-plus load of, say, the Champs Elysées in Paris or Barcelona's Diagonal, but it's still enough to rescue most streets in our biggest urbs from the hegemony...
...Monderman long argued that the overuse of signage was due to a misguided culture of risk avoidance among town planners. "Each time someone complains," he told TIME, "something gets added to the system. And no one asks if it's effective." But for the shared-space faithful, bigger prizes are at stake than mere road safety. For Moylan, the promise is "civilization and dancing in the streets." Likewise, Monderman rhapsodized that, "Eye contact and the consultation between civilians in public space is the highest quality you can get in a free country." His enduring vision echoes that of a poetic...