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The beauty: it just works! Unregulated road traffic flowing smoothly in India—and it worked for the Netherlands, too.
I'm not sure "anarchy" is the proper term to describe this kind of self-regulating system. In fact, naked streets seems a much better one.
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Today’s topic seems to be traffic so I thought I’d add a few thoughts of my own.
Today Philipp Schumann wrote a post linking to some videos showing unregulated traffic in India.
That post made Gavin Bowman post about what happened in his town aft... [Read More]
» Traffic chaos from The Obligatory Blog
A post on Philipp Schumann's blog this morning reminded me of a local situation. Here's what I posted in his comments.
After we had a flood in our city, there was no power to some important traffic signals for quite some time. It was noticed tha... [Read More]
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Speak to anyone who is visually impaired and they will give you a different view of the efficacy of "naked streets".
Posted by: Spider | 05/26/2006 at 10:07
Point taken---with reservation: I fail to see how visually impaired drivers can observe traditional signage (see the Wired article I linked to: not all signs are bad, only most ones) better than simply observing traffic, or rather, the neighbouring vehicles (something a driver needs to do anyway)...
Posted by: Philipp Schumann | 05/26/2006 at 10:17
I think maybe he meant visually impaired pedestrians, they must have a hard time crossing.
Interesting aside... After we had a flood in our city, there was no power to some important traffic signals for quite some time. It was noticed that traffic was flowing through the junction more smoothly without the lights. Rather than just ignore the evidence, they ran a pilot scheme for a while which kept the lights turned off. Now, they only operate on a part time basis, in peak rush hours (maybe a total of 4-6 hours per day). The rest of the time it's just a free for all.
I don't drive often, but as far as I can tell, it works. I doubt anyone would ever have been brave enough to try it if the original experiment hadn't been forced by the flood.
Posted by: Gavin Bowman | 05/26/2006 at 10:52
Ah, that's a good point.
If we were talking only about blind people, it would be easy, they would have to rely as much on help by an accompanying person or dog as today (and indicate this visibly, also through their white cane, to others). Partially visually impaired people are different though.
It should be noted that naked streets are not per se removing all regulation and letting all traffic participants roam freely ("anarchy"); rather, it is a less-is-more road design approach, but still "road design", i.e. humans thinking about and implementing better traffic designs for all people. I have a hard time imagining that road designers such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Monderman would not consider people with special needs in their work.
Posted by: Philipp Schumann | 05/26/2006 at 11:09
Actually, they're not the first ones to do it... Andy Hunt writes about when the Brits did a similar thing:
http://www.toolshed.com/blog/articles/2005/01/27/removing-all-the-traffic-lights
Posted by: Keith Casey | 05/26/2006 at 16:46