Some European traffic planners have envisioned streets free of rules and directives, and they’re beginning to put these ideas into action. According to Germany’s Spiegel, a pilot project being implemented by the European Union is seeing seven cities eliminate most or all traffic signs.
“The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior,” says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project’s co-founders. “The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.” The project’s underlying theory is less rules eliminates the tunnel vision caused by excessive regulation. In this case, “unsafe” may be “safe,” because motorists are forced to be more vigilant.
“More than half of our signs have already been scrapped,” says traffic planner Koop Kerkstra from the town of Drachten, where the experiment is being tested on a large scale. “Only two out of our original 18 traffic light crossings are left, and we’ve converted them to roundabouts.” Now traffic is regulated by just two rules: “Yield to the right” and “Get in someone’s way and you’ll be towed.”
