Junction without any traffic lights/and signs safer?

Factual Questions
1

I was discussing driving styles without someone and I remember an article on the internet about a junction where they removed all the signs and possibly also the traffic lights (not sure about the traffic lights part) and this resulted in fewer accidents. IRC it was in The Netherlands, but I’m not sure. The other person thought it was very interesting and would like to read the article, but I can’t find it and can’t remember where I read it. It could have been Cracked, but I couldn’t find it there.

Can anyone help?

2

Shared Spaces.

3

This is part of a larger concept that points out that proposed efforts to make things safer will actually change peoples’ behavior so that they take more risk.

Seat belts, motorcycle helmets, tornado alarms can have this counterintuitive property. If you think that a seat belt or air bag will protect you in the case of a crash you might drive faster or weave in and out of traffic or not slow down in the rain. If you start depending on tornado alarms you might not pay as much attention to the sky. And if you assume that other people are obeying all traffic signs, you might not be as alert for the people who aren’t.

What critical to remember is that no change can ever have a purely positive effect. It must always be the net sum of the positive and the negative. It’s seldom clear how to measure that. Just finding all the factors that need to be included is close to impossible, let alone quantifying each one. Nor can you ever measure what doesn’t happen because of the change. In the real world, seat belts were perceived to be a net positive because they appeared to save lives and reduce the seriousness of injuries.

The rationale behind putting signs on streets - of all traffic laws - is that real world drivers were acting dangerously. Accidents did happen. Lives were lost. Pedestrians were hit. Property was damaged. Signage appeared to ameliorate this. Any individual sign or law, such as a speed limit, made the street safer.

The question is whether the total effect of the multitude of signs and laws cumulatively results in a net negative. How many different commands can you juggle in your mind simultaneously as you drive? How complacent do you get about other drivers? Would driving with more attention (or, with greater paranoia) have the same effect of reducing your speed and forcing you to watch at intersections?

The answer is: possibly. That, at least, is the theory behind this experiment. In the short term, redesigning streets to force drivers to make decisions that the signs once made for them seems to be an improvement. What happens in the long term, though? Changes makes changes in behavior. Will drivers stick with their altered, safer, behavior? Or will they adjust to this new reality and go back to more individual patterns in the knowledge that they are not in violation for doing so?

Nobody knows the answer to that. They do know that the current system has made driving enormously safer. There are far fewer automobile deaths today that 60 years ago, even though the miles driven have multiplied. That is a net effect of changes to both cars and streets, and so is hard to divvy up.

I try to drive today assuming that all other drivers are insane maniacs who are liable to do anything at any moment. But the truth is that most of the time I just drive. Would I be more cautious and drive slower and safer if I kept to my ideal? Yes, almost certainly. Can I do so every minute in the fog of everyday dull thinking-about-the-destination reality? Almost certainly not. Do I drive more cautiously if I’m in a strange city? Sure, everybody does. Do I go on autopilot on the streets that I drive every day and know so well the car almost drives itself home? Sure, everybody does. That’s the dilemma for street changers. Can they introduce just enough uncertainty to increase safety or does the increased uncertainty lead to increased pain. It’s a fascinating experiment that mostly people will want other people to try first.

4

To the OP, I seem to remember reading something like that too, and it definitely sounds like something Cracked would have done an article on, though they do usually provide citations for that sort of stuff when they do. Did you try looking there?

Exapno’s response is excellent, and I don’t really have much to add to it except for some thought experiments. I’m driving down a highway with moderate traffic and going at the speed of the traffic which is roughly 40mph. We come up on someone doing 30mph, causing some congestition as people behind him have to slow down, some people change lanes to get around him, etc. It seems to me that one driver is causing greater hazard because he’s causing drivers around him to react in ways that increases uncertainty.

Now let’s say that the posted speed limit is 30mph. If the conditions are generally safe enough to go faster and traffic is generally going faster, that person going 30mph just because he’s told to is actually introducing greater risk. Naturally, by removing the posted signage, you’ll have fewer people going slower than traffic just because that’s what the signs say, though you’ll probably still have some going slower for other reasons. Regardless, because those going slower would decrease, it would seem logical to conclude that it would increase safety on that road.

Or for an anecdotal example, it seems to be common, at least around here, that shopping center parking lots will often have incoming traffic have full right of way and all other directions have stops. Still, I’ll often see cars trying to leave seem to assume that because they have a stop sign that incoming traffic does as well and they’ll start going assuming the incoming traffic will stop, and I’ve seen plenty of close calls as a result. Obviously, a prudent driver entering, despite having right of way, will at least slow down and evaluate what all the drivers are doing. That sort of situation I also think removing all signage would probably help.

5

A town in England got a bit of press last month for this - might be where you heard about it recently.

6

I hate it personally. The town just to the west of mine has a bunch of intersections where no driver in any direction has a stop or yield sign.

I know someone in the local government and when I asked about it th response was that when people who live around there realize it’s uncontroled they act much more carefully.

My response was “What about poor schmucks like me who didn’t know the intersection was uncontroled and drove right through only to be horrified at the realization the the guy comming from the left to t-bone me wasn’t slowing down either?”

7

Well, if it’s the ‘downtown’ area of a small town/village where everyone is moving at just 15 mph already, it seems it could work. Most parking lots are ‘shared space’ with painted lines as just suggestions and that mostly works. Also, if there are hits, they won’t be major.

Once you’re going over 25 mph, it ain’t going to work. Not enough time to stop for someone (vehicle or pedestrian) unexpectedly claiming the right of way.

Also notice that the intersection in the linked video about has no cars parked along the streets and so, there is long lines of sight. Wouldn’t work at all if there was street parking there.

Also, for places like NYC, the lights going up and down the narrow island are timed to allow relatively quick driving even during high congestion times. A ‘shared space’ NYC would add at least 40 minutes to drive time there.

8

Yes, they certainly aren’t intended to speed things up. Much more appropriate for town centers than through-ways.

9

Also as that video shows, the entire street design and its relationship to pedestrians was rethought. You can’t simply remove the signs. You provide positive cues to replace the negative ones. And you have to accept some small inconveniences in order to improve other aspects, like removing some on-street parking and other barriers to sight.

Creating new spaces is easier than retrofitting old ones. I was struck by their saying that they had to reduce the lanes in the double roundel to one from two, because pedestrians can’t cross two in time. A huge percentage of streets, really some whole cities, in the U.S. were created to have six, eight, ten lanes to accommodate as many cars as possible. Las Vegas is nothing but a series of suburban sprawl highways in a gridwork. And those were all created at enormous expense in the very recent past. Could any political will exist to tear their all out and put in new ones? This is the odd case that the narrow, winding streets of European cities, once considered to be unworkable in the auto age, may have more future potential than our boulevards because they can be changed to something more sensible. The U.S. will take much more thought and creativity.

10

I simply wish roundabouts were more common in this country. A number of areas in Metro Detroit have replaced signaled intersections with roundabouts. The most effective ones have been in the “outer” suburbs where the population has increased dramatically but the main roads still are only one lane in each direction. Even some of the really busy intersections like Van Dyke/M-53/18-1/2 Mile have been greatly eased by changing the intersection to a roundabout.

sure, you occasionally get some self-centered jackwagon who doesn’t understand the concept of “yield” or a blue-haired milkshake who sees this con-sarned “roundybout” thing and freaks out, but by and large they work great.

11

I knew a traffic engineer who explained that installing stop lights and signs don’t eliminate accidents. Interestingly, although they can reduce them, but also they also change the nature of the accidents. It’s been decades since we talked, so I don’t remember the details, but it was something like changing from a stop sign to a stop light reduces the number of side collisions, but increases the number of cars getting hit from behind.

12

That’s probably true. However, overall you’re likely trading minor bumps at low speeds for major damage at higher speeds and that’s a net positive. And there are advantages for pedestrians and cyclists.

13

As a mere anecdote, most of our island’s major intersections are roundabouts. Traffic flow adapts during rush hour to favor approaches that have the right of way. It simply shifts which road gets backed up, it doesn’t eliminate the problem during peak congestion periods. But most of the time traffic flows more or less smoothly with minimal interruption.

Recently the traffic light signal controller electronics failed at one of our few major intersections controlled by lights. The backup controller they had on hand also failed. It was about four days where this intersection was uncontrolled. We had hundreds of calls to 9-1-1 complaining about the problem, but interestingly not a single accident at that intersection during those four days. Normally we would get a couple MVAs there over such a period of time, so it may not be statistically significant.

14

yep; red light cameras and shortened yellows have been rightfully decried for increasing rear-end collisions.

15

That’s not a problem of red lights. That’s a problem of badly designed red lights or red lights that actively violate guidelines. Not at all comparable.

16

:confused:

17

I like talking to myself…

Actually, I have no idea what happened there!

18

Ah! Found it. It was on Cracked after all.

19

I’ve driven and cycled through Poynton (the town linked above) a few times and it feels pretty uncomfortable, dangerously so on the bike. No one knows who has priority and there is a lot of confusion - and there are only a couple of junctions, it’s a small area.

One could imagine every town like this and it being a brilliant, workable design where everyone just chilled out and drove in an alert fashion. In isolation, though, there’s clearly a sharp learning curve. Poynton itself is just off a truly horrible A-road (the A6) that is choked with traffic, so you must get a lot of irritated drivers turning off and having a WTF moment when confronted with the road layout there.

Accidents are apparently down, though. It was written up as a short piece in the Guardian leader comment the other day.

20

I live in a suburb where almost all intersections are 4-way stops. Not only does this practice increase pollution, but it is dangerous. At the few intersections that are stops in only two directions, the cars that stop assume it is a stop in the other direction as well and barrel through just slowing down as everyone does at the 4-way stops. I don’t know but I would be surprised if there have been no accidents caused by this. What I would do if I were a traffic engineer (I have discussed this with my son who is), I would replace the 4-way stops by yield signs and leave the regular 2-ways stops.

I also like roundabouts, but there is not room in most urban areas.