What’s the largest city that has no traffic lights?
The city of Carmel, Indiana (pop 92K) has plans to replace all its traffic lights with roundabouts. Well, all except one. I understand there’s one that they figure they can’t replace, probably because there’s not enough room at that intersection. Anyway, they currently have over 120 roundabouts and are shooting for about 140.
Anyway, that made me wonder about the question. I doubt if the answer (if it is known) is in the US. Carmel easily has way more roundabouts than any other city in North America.[sup]1[/sup] But perhaps there’s a good-sized city in Europe or Australia that has eliminated all their traffic lights.
[sup]1[/sup] The runners up are Frisco TX (pop 117K) with over 40 and Bend OR (98K) with close to 40.
Those are most likely what are known as Neighborhood Traffic Circles, which are not the same thing as roundabouts. They’re only purpose is to calm traffic. That is, keep people from speeding through residential streets. Roundabouts, while they do calm traffic, also are intended to reduce congestion and keep traffic flowing smoothly.
Tekes County in Xinjiang, outer north province of China, is set out in an Taoist Bagua or Eight Diagrams pattern (four ring roads connecting 64 streets, with eight radial main routes) and apparently has no traffic lights since 1996 (and no traffic jams). Population in 2002 was 150,000.
As the the associated questions of largest city without working traffic lights and largest city where traffic lights are simply ignored … I suspect that that is a much bigger field.
From what I can glean from Google maps: stop signs, several concentric ring roads that have right of way, and the centre of town is effectively a giant traffic circle.
Plus, Venice, at least the area administered by the Venice municipail authorities, includes a mainland district named Mestre. Which is a perfectly ordinary Italian city with perfectly ordinary streets and does have traffic lights.
What I originally said above was that there were probably stop signs (not traffic lights) on the spoke roads, making it a PITA to get to the right distance from the city center to use the correct ring road. Looking at the layout, the spoke roads seem to be more major streets, and the “ring roads” join at an angle, exactly like a spider web, as I observed earlier. Makes me think it’s more likely that the spoke roads have the right of way, with the sides streets having stop signs to cross or turn onto them. Meaning that if you are a “spider” at the city center, you use it exactly like a spider web, traveling out on the right spoke to get to your destination. The drawback would be that if you wanted to go to another destination at the same distance from the city center, and it is a significant arc length, you are better off traveling in to the center on a spoke, and using the big traffic circle in the middle to get out again on the proper spoke for your destination.
