Archive for the ‘Traffic Signs’ Category

This is priceless. The bit in Welsh there, rather than translating the traffic info in English, is actually an “out of office” auto reply that made it in by error.

What went wrong?

All official road signs in Wales are bilingual, so the local authority e-mailed its in-house translation service for the Welsh version of: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only” The reply duly came back and officials set the wheels in motion to create the large sign in both languages.”

I know most of you are paying attention to only one election, but let’s not overlook that the results of another ballot are in. It’s “Europe’s Most Stupid Road Sign”.

Photo by Canadiana/Flickr

Photo by J.Lo/Flickr

Photo by Canadiana/Flickr

Photo by Canadiana/Flickr

Photo: Citynoise.org

As just a short note following up on my comments on Montreal’s strange “Stop” signs, another thing to note of course is the linguistic variation. I’ve just returned from the Westmount region of the city, where the signs are in English (as in the one posted below, which, as Citynoise.org notes, seems a bit odd since the English bit on the street signs has been blacked out).

But one also seems to find bilingual English/French, as well as signs in Mohawk, Inuktitut, and Kahnawake — there may be more. In any case, an interesting reminder of how culture trickles into the standardized regime of traffic safety.

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

I was struck by these “arret” signs in Montreal, which have an additional sign informing the driver of which other roadways have a stop sign. In theory, I suppose, this is meant to be a good thing, giving the driver information as to who will be stopping, etc.

But there are a few problems. The first is that it took me a few weeks to even notice the supplementary information. The second is that often the sign is just providing redundant information (informing the driver, on say, a one-way street that the opposing street will not be stopping — but of course there will be no oncoming traffic as it’s one-way!). The third, as you can see in the photo, is that it just adds more information to an already complex and quite garish bouquet of warnings.

But the most objectionable thing about these signs is that they exist at all. These are scattered all over “Vieux Montreal,” which has a warren of narrow, pre-automobile streets, with an abundance of pedestrians and cyclists (and horse-drawn carriages). Drivers should be looking at the streets, looking around, not glancing up at a sign to discern who will be stopping and who won’t (that is, if they obey the sign in the first place).

Here’s another in the ongoing series of unconventional traffic-calming treatments. Over at Cognitive Edge they’ve got photographs of a recent community project to put up so-called “scare-cars,” or traffic-calming scarecrows, in a small English village that apparently gets occasionally overrun thanks to sat-nav-enabled shortcut seekers. This taps into the idea that people slow for novel things, or when reminded they’re in a human place.

Bonus points for socio-economic realism: There has been a documented outmigration of “Polish plumbers” from England back to the more favorable climes of Poland.

(thanks to John Dodds)

An alert reader sends along some more coverage, this time by Isabelle de Pommereau in the Christian Science Monitor, of Bohmte, a German village that has become another waypoint in the evolving “Shared Space” movement (I was in the town a few years ago, for a Shared Space conference, but haven’t been back since things were changed). The town, like many, felt overwhelmed by the 13,000 vehicles per day coursing through its small center.

Readers of the book and blog by now may well know the drill:

“But this summer the town reworked its downtown thoroughfare, not only scrapping the traffic lights but also tearing down the curbs and erasing marked crosswalks. The busiest part of the main street turned into a “naked” square shared equally by bikes, pedestrians, cars, and trucks. Now, there is only one rule: Always give way to the person on the right.”

Bohmte is providing yet another surprising example of the types of environments in which this sort of thing can be done: “What’s revolutionary about Bohmte is that it took off its signs on a state highway with a lot of traffic,” says Heiner Monheim, a traffic management expert at the University of Trier, speaking at a recent European conference on sign-free towns convened here. Beyond that, Monheim says, the model’s real legacy is to have brought people closer to “rediscovering and appreciating cities not only as traffic places but also as human, social places.”

But I was also struck in particular by this passage:

“Two months into the experiment, ‘Instead of thinking, ‘It’s going to be red, I need to give gas, people have to slow down, to look to the right and the left, to be considerate,’ says Ms. Rubcic… The bonus? Town people recognize they have become a bit closer to one another. ‘The whole village has become more human. We look at each other, we greet each other,’ she says.”

They give the enemy clear directions. This from the wonderful little book, The Original Highway Code, which reprints earlier editions of the perennial British bestseller.

In the ongoing series of local residents’ efforts to slow traffic in their neighborhoods, I bring you this fake speed camera, installed by a dentist in Hamburg.

Said the dentist: “This street leads to school and kindergarten. But it does not seem to interest the drivers. The limit is 60, but despite this they are always racing.”

The report notes the curious detail that because “Kaps’ fake speed radar does not emit a light which might endanger traffic, he has not broken the law.”

Photo by Bruce Bisping, Star Tribune

Twin Cities reader Matt sends along this link to another kind of novel traffic calming (at least, “informal” traffic calming), a series of unorthodox signs by artist Steven Woodward, who, is apparently, former artist in residence with the St. Paul Public Works Department (and how great it is that the public works department has an artist in residence?). The artist’s goal is to help give neighborhoods a sense of place, at least in the eyes of passing drivers. My personal favorite is the one above, as it makes me wonder if the persuasive powers of eye contact, even simulated eye contact, might induce drivers to slow down. In any case, it’s certainly more interesting than a “Resident Parking Only” sign.

"LA Interchange," by Luther Thie

I was intrigued by the conceptual art piece pictured above, Luther Thie’s LA Interchange, which I read about recently via BldgBlog.

The piece, which would sit at the intersection of the Santa Monica and Harbor Freeways, “uses real-time automobile accident information culled from the California Highway Patrol Incident Report website and would activate the enormous water fountain at the intersection of the freeways. Visitors on location at the park would also see a digital display streaming from the CHP website (location/region, date, time, accident type and status). This real-time data display system creates a real-time memorial to California highway accident victims. Highway activity can be viewed as a kind of “life-pulse” of the State transportation system. The fountain is, in a sense, the heart of the roadway system, reacting to the endless accident events on the highways. When a fatality occurs, the fountain rises to its highest possible point and blue lights illuminate the water feature, evoking a sublime moment of reflection for the spectators.”

This idea put me in mind of several things. First, the fountains at the laweiplein in Drachten, in the Netherlands, home of the famous un-signed “squareabout” pictured below. These water levels rise with congestion, however, not fatalities.

More directly, however, it reminded me of something I had seen in Hanoi, Vietnam, in the busy intersection near the Daewoo Hotel off of Kim Ma Street: A giant billboard (pictured below), sort of Fenway Park meets Socialist Realism, one section of which reported ongoing road fatalities (and thanks to Greig Craft at the nearby Asia Injury Prevention Foundation for pointing this out to me). It’s not quite visible in this shot, but there are categories like “traffic fatalities this year,” “today,” etc. — as well as time and temperature.

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

It’s an interesting idea, and one that I’ve not seen replicated anywhere else. It recalls the sort of factory-floor safety campaign signs one sees (”X days since accident”), depicting information that we generally don’t have access to as we drive — feedback if you will (and apparently this has been tried at least one other place, as the photo below shows). I’m not sure to what extent this would change behavior, or what people would draw from the information, but as it now stands the only way we are reminded of the danger of the road is the impromptu roadside memorials (or “ghost bikes”) that are erected (and typically removed by highway departments). But I’ve often wondered if leaving those memorials up would be more effective than other traditional warning signs, in terms of influencing behavior.

Photo By Annene von Durchgerockt/Flickr

Hippie Gal/Flickr

In the New York Times Maura Casey writes about a tree in the middle of the road in her Connecticut town:

“Sometime, decades ago, town officials decided to pave around the tree instead of cutting it down for the convenience of cars despite the fact that it probably made more sense to remove it while widening the road. But it was a perfectly good tree, and someone argued, successfully, that it be left alone. In a world with little tolerance for eccentricity, it is hard to imagine that decision being made today.”

There’s absolutely no reason residential streets, like the one pictured above, shouldn’t have trees in the middle of the road. Apart from the aesthetic contribution, they’re great natural traffic calming devices. Yes, you have to slow down to navigate around them, yes they reduce the “sight distance” of whatever lays beyond (hence you have to slow down), and yes they are a crash “hazard” — if you act in a hazardous way.

Unfortunately, in too many places in America, someone would come along at a speed they shouldn’t be going — or maybe they’re otherwise “impaired” — and they smack into the tree, fatally or otherwise. The town, worried about safety and lawsuits, etc., calls for “improvements” to be made to the street — beginning with cutting down the offending tree as a “safety measure.” Of course, on the new widened, standardized road, speeds will thus increase, shifting the hazard from the drivers of cars to the residents of the neighborhood themselves. Idiot-proofed streets tend to breed idiotic behavior.

Those neighbors, grown tired of cars whizzing down their streets, may even turn to their own solution, as a group of residents in Seattle did (thanks to James Callan for the tip) when they bought speed bumps at Costco and installed them on their own streets in an effort to stop people from driving at speeds approaching 50 mph. This didn’t sit well with the Seattle DOT, who had the non-complying, offending devices removed. The kicker comes in the final line: “The city has already allocated $15,000 to the neighborhood, which can be used for traffic signs.”

Signs, as any number of studies have shown, are essentially useless at slowing drivers. That $15,000 would be better spent on a planting a tree or two — in the middle of the road.

Just back home and going through all the good mail that’s been coming in after Week One of the tour. I had two trivial observations based on recent trips to Boston and D.C. In Boston, don’t know the particular address, I saw an interesting sign that said “Shared Space,” 10 mph. This is a European idea I haven’t seen previously expressed in the U.S., at least so literally. Anyone know its origins?

Also, while on the traffic signs tip, what’s up with the weird, yellow one-way signs in D.C., with their extremely small indications of what times the streets are one way and when they’re not? They seemed hard to scan while deciding whether or not to turn into a street. And is it just me or do they almost look like advertising notices?

Via Design Observer, a good parody of corporate design vis a vis the Stop Sign. I’d also love to see a parody film of a traffic study…

A few readers have asked me what I thought of “Distracting Miss Daisy,” an article by Duke University psychologist John Staddon in the current Atlantic (the full text is past the jump).

To briefly summarize, Staddon, who has driven in both the U.K. and the U.S., thinks American drivers suffer from a surfeit of traffic signs and speed limits. “The more you look for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be to traffic conditions.” He argues this helps explain the superior traffic safety record of the U.K.

On the whole, I was quite sympathetic to the spirit of the article, which was lively and well-argued — indeed, it visits a number of themes and places mentioned in my book (which has, for example, a section called “The Trouble with Traffic Signs”). His line, “we spend a lifetime on the roads after we get our licenses, and we’re being trained by our experiences every day,” could serve as a summary of Traffic. And as someone who recently took, as an experiment, a U.K. driving test (I’m writing an article about this), I’ve got my own opinions about comparative driving culture in the U.S. and the U.K., some of which are in line with Staddon’s point of view.

There were a few points in the article I thought deserved discussion, however.

1.) He says that in his experience, people “drive faster” in Britain. This just shows, I suppose, how subjective experience is. I challenge anyone to spend a week taking black cabs in London, and a week taking Yellow Cabs in New York City, and report a higher average velocity in the former. Also, the default speed limit in England of “lit, urban roads” is 30 mph. I’ve been in U.S. cities, in fairly urbanized areas, with (unobeyed) 40 mph limits. While we’re on the subject of limits, he does not mention in his piece the widespread deployment of speed cameras and red-light cameras in the U.K., two technologies which would seem “designed to control drivers and reduce their discretion” — a charge he makes against U.S. traffic safety efforts.

2.) He rightly invokes “risk compensation” in discussing why safety improvements in cars do not often produce the desired results: The safer people feel, the more riskily they act. But a bit later, he notes, “a particularly vexing aspect of the U.S. policy is that speed limits seem to be enforced more when speeding is safe.” (e.g., a sunny day). But is this not a form of risk compensation in itself? After all, most crashes occur during the day, during normal weather — the times we no doubt feel safer. As Leonard Evans notes in Traffic Safety, nearly 85% of fatal crashes happen on dry roads. There’s no such objective, quantifiable thing as a “safe” speed in traffic — plenty of people have died driving at the proper “design speed” of roads, while many children have been killed in driveways by cars going under 5 mph. The only thing we scientifically know is the higher the speed at which you collide with something, the greater the physical damage, and greater the risk of dying.

3.) And on the subject of speed, I am skeptical of Haddon’s claim that “looking at your speedometer” is an important form of distraction on the roads. First, I’m not sure how much time is actually spent looking at speedometers (in one study, drivers were asked, after they went through a slow school zone, how fast they were driving, and their estimates were wildly low). The second is that experienced drivers typically have a lot of spare cognitive workload, plenty for quick glances at gauges — and any minor distraction from a speedometer pales with the demands of, say, cell-phone conversations.

4.) I was interested that he notes that he finds roads “generally wider” here, which one might think would make things safer. In my U.K. driving test, taken in suburban London, I was quite surprised to find how often, on small residential streets, I had to pull over to let another car by. In general, I found road geometries tighter (and I was driving a fairly small car). But this is one of the ongoing debates in traffic safety: Making roads wider means you have less chance to bump into someone, but it also means you’re likely to drive faster. The experiments in which traffic control have been taken away (e.g., Drachten, Poundbury) only work because they are happening at very slow speeds, where the logic of human interaction, and not traffic engineering, take over.

(more…)

Hmmm... Am I MUTCD compliant?

From Monocle (thanks Kottke!) comes news of an intriguing initiative in La Paz, Bolivia. In a place where pedestrians can feel like hapless toreadors weaving through lines of three-thousand pound bulls, the cebras voluntarias help calm traffic and keep order at the city’s intersections. This is similar in spirit to the “mental speed bumps” practiced by legendary Australian traffic tamer David Engwicht, the idea being to use novelty and interest to remind drivers they are in a human environment.

For some reason, South America seems to have a lock on these kind of offbeat initiatives; Antanus Mockus, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, once hired mimes to silently scorn bad drivers. Mimes, for many people, can engender a hostile response. But who doesn’t like zebras? Truly a road striping innovation.

Like Ken Todd and the thieves in The Italian Job remake, I have my troubles with traffic signals. But I’m always interested in the evolution of a standard technology and the various roads not taken along the way. That’s why I was delighted by this entry, via boingboing gadgets, from Charles Marshall, an Australian engineer from the 1930s.

Rather than binary lights, the signal ticks away the phases like a colorful clock or analog scale (you can see quite clearly how one direction gets more “green time” than the other). Visually, it conjures in me feelings of everything from Kandinsky to RAF Spitfires to The Hudsucker Proxy. As historian Gordon Sessions notes in his no-nonsense titled survey Traffic Devices: Historical Aspects Thereof (ITE, 1971), this sort of thing was once rather common, one of the many rival entrants for traffic control schemes jockeying for supremacy in the world’s streets. Early on, for example, there was often no “amber phase,” just green and red; in early 20th century Cleveland, Sessions notes, “at the time of the change from red to green or vice versa, a bell was sounded to warn traffic of the impending change.” Los Angeles, meanwhile, had its own version of the Marshall device, at the corner of Wilshire and Western. As described by Sessions, there was “a clock-like circular face with an indicator hand which revolved, showing the motorist the amount of ‘stop’ and ‘go’ interval that remained.”

“Countdown signals” are becoming quite common for pedestrians (and many drivers use these to “time” the lights to their advantage), but the idea of showing drivers remaining signal time is today rare — though I did come across this in Delhi, where drivers use the time indicator to decide whether to shut off their engines at the lights and save fuel. This is an obvious benefit, but as with most things in traffic, there are trade-offs: Drivers may pay more attention to trying to judge how much time is left than the actual traffic ahead, or people still in the intersection; or they may use their knowledge of the remaining phase to accelerate to unsafe speeds. Still, the Marshall device is a tantalizing alternative to the aesthetic monotony of standardized traffic signals.