Word: monderman
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...decades, traffic engineer Hans Monderman had a hair-raising way of showing off his handiwork to anyone who took the trouble to visit his native northern Dutch province of Friesland. He would walk backward, arms folded, into the flow of traffic, and without horn-honking or expletives, drivers would slow or stop to let him safely cross to the other side. Monderman's stunt was an act of faith in the concept of "shared space," a radical street-design principle he quietly pioneered in more than 120 projects across Friesland. By the time he died of cancer last month, Monderman...
...Monderman, that inquiry began with the more prosaic challenge of getting cars to slow down. Like every transport planner faced with the relentless proliferation of motor vehicles, he had started out by assiduously putting up signs, painting lines and devising new traffic-calming projects. One of his early specialties was to place giant flowerpots in the road to make drivers hit the brakes. But in 1982, Monderman risked a bolder approach, redesigning the street layout of car-clogged Frisian towns and villages. He began by removing the road signs, traffic lights and surface markings, then set about eliminating the curb...
...took another 15 years before Monderman could fully articulate his new concept. His key insight was that all the street signs, traffic lights and other paraphernalia intended to keep pedestrians and motorists safely apart actually discourage both groups from engaging with each other. In an interview with TIME several weeks before his death, Monderman explained that removing signs forces you "to look each other in the eye, to judge body language and learn to take responsibility - to function as normal human beings...