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Heat Things Up With Desire at the Blanton [Art Preview]
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Editor’s note: The views expressed in The Weekly What If are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the IST network.
How about slower traffic, less accidents, safer streets for children and wait for it,
no more text messaging while driving?
That’s right, in a never ending quest to make our streets safer and more predictable, we may have actually made them more dangerous and so mind numbingly easy to drive that we enable bad behaviors such as texting while driving.
Let me reiterate that: The design of our streets may be partially to blame for drivers text messaging.
How could this possibly be true?
Ever notice how much more careful you are when driving through a parking lot full of cars?
Unless you really like moseying through grocery store parking lots, you’re being careful because you fully expect a car, a pedestrian or a shopping cart to pop out at any moment. You are adjusting your behavior based on perceived risk; experts commonly call this risk compensation and it is an idea that is not limited in its application to driving. For example, there has been a great deal of research that shows that children will take much greater risks when wearing protective gear and apparently traffic ‘safety devices’ serve a similar role with drivers.
Have you ever walked into a cross walk when it says ‘cross’ without looking for traffic?
How about not looking to the left and right when you have a green light and are passing through an intersection?
Of course, we all have. Even though we should be as vigilant doing these things as we might in the parking lot of the HEB, we’re generally not. Instead of relying on our senses to tell us whether a situation is safe or not, we most often trust the safety features. We are thus lulled into a false sense of security and have very little risk compensation. When something doesn’t ‘match’ what the signals and signs are telling us, when we are not prepared for the unpredictable, our reaction time is even slower, and chances of an accident are even greater.
With this in mind it is little surprise that most car accidents occur at traffic lights when a driver has a green light or that more pedestrians are killed in crosswalks then jay walking (Vanderbilt 178, 197). The design or actual placement of these things can also increase the likelihood of an accident because they actually focus our attention away from potential threats; traffic lights cause us to look up instead of at the road and crosswalks focus our attention ahead rather than to the left or right.
These safety features along with the design and size of our roads have been shown, like the child’s protective gear, to not only diminish vigilance but to also increase risk taking behavior.
For example, one well-documented study in Longmont, Colorado demonstrated that twenty-four foot wide streets are four times safer than thirty-six foot wide streets (Swift). A noted street designer, Robert B. Noland, has consistently found over a twenty-four year span that nationwide, ten-foot wide streets are considerably better safety records than twelve-foot wide streets. Why? Wider streets convey a greater sense of predictability and thereby encourage drivers to speed, pay less attention or find other means of stimulation like text messaging to alleviate boredom.
Lane dividers are troublesome too?
A well-documented study in England showed that when lines were present, drivers actually maintained less lane discipline and drove closer to the center of the road (and opposing traffic) than on unmarked roads (Vanderbilt 199).
Need an example in Austin?
Last week while riding my bike down Sixth Street I was entirely surprised to find myself accelerating to make the light as I approached an intersecting flanked by one of the relatively new countdown crosswalk timers.
Have any of y’all found yourselves doing the same thing? I’d love to know.
So strangely, a device meant to improve safety for pedestrians actually increases vehicular speed through the intersection while focusing all users’ attention on the timer rather than the surrounding conditions, thereby creating a more dangerous situation.
Can you find any other examples in Austin where ‘traffic safety’ measures are having a similar inverse effect?
On which roads in Austin do you tend to find yourself compelled to drive faster or are bored enough that you’re likely to do something you probably shouldn’t?
Post your findings or observations here, I eagerly await your findings.
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Next week in the Weekly What If?
Why are deer carcasses are more effective for slowing traffic than deer crossing signs?
Are there really places other than obscure Dutch towns that have designed uncertainty into their streets, thereby improving safety and livability?
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In the meantime, if you are interested in reading more about this topic, I highly recommend Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do And What It Says About Us. I have drawn from many sources and research for this article but Vanderbilt’s book neatly brings much of this research together into a clear and enjoyable format. David Engwicht also has some great downloadable resources on his website: www.lesstraffic.com. I will share more information on related people, resources and organizations next week.
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Sources Cited:
Vanderbilt, Tom. 'Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do And What It Says About Us.' Knopf: New York, 2008.
Peter Swift, Dan Painter and Goldstein, Matthew. 'Residential Street Typology and Injury Accident Frequency'. Congress of New Urbanism Conference Presentation, 1997.
The Weekly What If? is a new weekly column by Alex Gilliam. Alex Gilliam is the founder of Public Workshop, an organization dedicated to helping individuals, schools, and communities achieve great things through design. The Weekly What If? focuses on re-imagining various aspects of how Austin, as a city, functions and feels. The goal is to foster a larger conversation about the present and future shape of our City.
Do you have a suggestion for something that needs to be re-imagined in Austin? Please email your suggestions to Alex:
alex [at] publicworkshop.us
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I think you bring up some good points. The biggest issue for me is what to do about that one car in the parking lot that's driving diagonally through the spaces at 60mph. How do we create a definition of "unsafe asshole" in a world where there are no set rules?
You run into this with HOAs a lot. There's a lot of assumptions about how to behave without a lot of actual strict guidance. By and large this means everyone errs on the side of caution, but when conflict eventually does occur it's much harder to deal with, because there are no set rules.
Tim.
You bring up a good point about rules and the 15% that is always going to be more inclined to break the rules or be more risky drivers......no matter what the design of the street.
I think the example of Antanas Mockus and his chastising mimes that I briefly mention in this week's article, offers an interesting example of a community fine tuning its methods for modifying behavior to meet the local needs/culture. It's particularly interesting because Mockus paired the absurd and the knowledge of the power of public shaming in Bogota's society with an iron-fisted approach to law-based enforcement. With the soccer based 'red' and 'yellow' cards he got his society to start taking responsibility for its actions.
The red and yellow card idea would probably never work here but I am inclined to believe that sometimes we need to think radically outside of the box to shake up a behavior trend. Yanking lines, etc. in some parts of Austin and relying on the design of the road for suggesting behavior may or may not be a good solution to addressing how Austin's street-use culture needs to change as it grows. I do however, think it's better for a group or place to decide what it ideally wants to be or how it wants a place to function, and then do everything possible to set the bar high for making sure a place looks, feels and works in that manner. You're going to have to deal with that 15% of rule breakers one way or another, why make everyone else miserable trying to control that group when they're going to push back either way? It's a hard question with no easy answers. Let me know if you have any other thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
This is particularly stupid Kool-Aid that pops its way back up every few years from people who 1) don't ever drive, 2) if they do, don't drive outside the urban core, and 3) apparently don't ever deal with suburbanites.
Take just one small example; this quote:
Uh, no. What happened there is that the efficiency of the traffic system was kept relatively high on the assumption other road users would follow the rules. Note that the pedestrians you're worried about travelling too quickly near would be travelling parallel to you, not perpendicular to you. Traffic control is about protecting the perpendicular travellers - for good reason; they're the vulnerable ones. Given sufficient buffer, it doesn't matter if you're going 5 or 55; what matters is that you don't run into me.
Shorter version: M1EK says it's all bullshit.
Per your comment, I've actually lived in and spent considerable time driving in all of the conditions you've described and then some so careful with the easy categorizations. Regardless of what you believe regarding the effectiveness of woonerfs, homezones, shared space, etc., your comments regarding the crossing signals miss the point. The crosswalk timers effectively increase speed of vehicles through an area where statistically most accidents occur. Whether you're dealing with perpendicular or parallel pedestrian traffic, cars or bicycles……that can't be good. Furthermore, what happens if the car isn't going straight and they race to make the light? Both race to beat the timer, focusing on it instead of their surroundings...
Your statement also assumes that a street can be a completely controlled environment and indirectly that the parallel in-street users are cars. As Austin continues to grow and become increasingly dense, these things are going to become less and less true. Regardless of your opinion on methods for dealing with this reality, they should be addressed as we consider and design Austin's future.
Alex, if you think we can eliminate traffic control devices at all our intersections and end up safer, and you actually have experience in the 'burbs, well, I don't know what to say.
The reason this works for the Dutch is that their cities are tiny, and a far higher proportion of traffic is cyclists and pedestrians. While I hope everybody in this forum hopes to increase our numbers of bikers/walkers, our city is still going to be hundreds of times as physically large as the European cities which have experimented with this nonsense - meaning that most people still have to commute a long ways.
And, yes, that affects people beyond the evil drivers. I biked 10-15 miles each way to a variety of offices in Austin. If every intersection was this type of nonsense, it'd have taken 5 times as long to get there. Likewise, while it may seem neat to stick it to Joe Auto, remember that the bus is operating on that same street, and is going to have to crawl through the same unsignalized/uncontrolled nonsense at walking speed, if that.
Again, it doesn't matter as much how quickly traffic is moving if it moves in an orderly fashion. This is something people get drastically wrong on the traffic calming front as well - speed humps do precisely nothing to help cyclists and pedestrians; getting hit broadside by a car going 20-25 isn't really much worse than getting hit broadside by a car going 30-35; in both cases I'd rather NOT get hit by a car going 30-35 that knows it has to stop because the light is red (and despite what a bunch of idiots on the internet will tell you, red lights work quite well for this purpose).
Addressing this separately since it's important.
I'd rather a car go 45 next to me than a car go 15 and hit me. Wouldn't you? If the car speeds up to catch the light, they are, in fact, paying attention to the light, which is green, which means they have the right of way - not you. If you get hit in that circumstance because they weren't paying attention to YOU, and they were going straight, it's you, not them, who is to blame.
Turning traffic is a separate issue - one that's hard to handle with any scheme you can think of. But people who are going to turn right typically don't speed up to do it; and this actually presents a pretty good argument for maintaining one-way street networks when you think about the left-turning traffic's natural incentives.
Whatever happened to Loudmouth? I miss Mr. T.
The Dutch have some of the safest roads in the world... and they did it by getting rid of curbs, traffic signals, street signs, etc.
Check out the article that Wired did back in 2004:
http://bit.ly/2lRwU
Many European countries have followed suit and done the same thing.
If you have ever driven in Bouldin Creek (78704) they put in the roundabouts in place of stop signs/speed bumps. It forces people to slow down and check to make sure no one else is approaching the intersection.
Its control based on fear, instead of assumptions. Everyone ALWAYS assumes they always have the right away, when they actually don't. You take away those assumptions and you have much safer roads.
Gary.
Thanks for your comments.
You make a good point about assumptions and rights. Although doing it since I first hopped on a bike, I recently became fully aware of the fact that when I do ride, I operate under the assumption that anything 'could' hit me. This mindset is really the only way you can stay truly safe when riding and it requires that you do things like try to make eye contact with other drivers and road users, look for patterns of movement, watch for wheel movement (on stationary cars), etc.. When risk remains abstract, you simply are less likely to perform these tasks. It is remarkable to realize how we do, particularly when bored, evaluate our driving effectiveness by how well we're able to stay in a lane and maintain a safe distance from the car in front of us.
Thanks for reminding us about the roundabouts on Bouldin- I had forgotten about them. They also have some Hyde Park. What do you think, do they work?
Best.
Alex
You know what else the Dutch (and the rest of Europe) did to make their roads safe? They actually educate their drivers. Any moron in the US can get a driver's license with a minimum of effort and money, but in Europe it's seriously expensive and time consuming to go through the education required to be able to drive.
As for this article, your headline and response are borderline retarded. You might have brought up valid points about human nature, but your argument applied to any city is completely nonsensical. Have you ever seen a busy 4 way stop intersection? It's a mess because most people either don't know or don't care to know who has the right of way. Now you go to 6th and Lamar and 5th and Lamar and take out all the lights. What would happen? Complete madness. How would anyone know when to go? There is always traffic coming from all sides. Traffic lights are there to promote efficient use of the roads. Even if you put stop signs at those 2 intersections, it would back up traffic throughout downtown. Roundabouts? Good luck finding the room inside all our grid cities with thousands of intersections. Have you even been to Europe? Do you realize how big the roundabouts are that handle lots of traffic? Maybe Whole Foods will be willing to move their building back across Bowie and we can build a nice big roundabout in its place.
YoYoMa. You're right about driver training and the relative cost of acquiring driving privileges in Europe. I distinctly remember meeting a German exchange student ages ago and being stunned by the thousands of dollars it cost him to get his driver's license and all of the rather serious classes he had to take. I have no idea on the relative statistics comparing American drivers to European ones and the point of this article isn’t to vilify American drivers but wow, I certainly could handle some European-style lane discipline on our highways. I digress.
Per your comment about the blind application of woonerfs, homezones, designed uncertainty, etc. to Austin?
Contrary to my purposely-dramatic title, I don’t believe in the uniform application of ideas, designs, etc. across cultures, especially that they can be a ‘cure all’. I think ideas can be adapted, reworked and added to, and great things can occur when it is done ‘with’ a client, community or culture. Each challenge, place or people are unique and we are remiss as designers, engineers or policy makers if this isn’t tacitly embraced.
Regardless, I do believe that it is critical to routinely introduce new ideas into a culture to help test, affirm and/or reframe our values and to imagine different futures. This column is intended to serve as a mechanism for doing this and at times I will be presenting some of the ideas in a purposely dramatic fashion. Regarding Lamar, it’s definitely a challenge and I’m glad you’re thinking about it- keep wrestling with it. Next week I will be throwing out some precedents that are particularly urban and one or two that are suburban. They may or may not provide solutions for those intersections on Lamar but I’m pretty sure they will broaden the conversation about how Austin’s streets and public spaces could feel, and function in the years to come.
You guys seem to be leaving out the asians and indians. This really looks like it works GREAT. I bet they have MUCH fewer accidents with this free for all system.
http://vimeo.com/1072440
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrEQaG5jPM
Bangkok has intense traffic and minimal traffic controls - very few signals, extremely few stop signs. From a pedestrian standpoint, it's complete fucking anarchy; one must dart between breaks in traffic in order to dodge flying cars and motorbikes to cross even sidestreets. Removing traffic controls in a society where everyone has cars might make it more likely that people won't text in drive. But it makes it pretty damned likely we'll all get run down crossing the street.
The sickest thing of all is the 40,000 deaths a year attached to the convenience of car travel. We all know relatives and friends killed and maimed in cars, yet our eyes glaze over as if we cannot acknowledge the reality of this. Can't we retain our autonomy and privacy and get around without the price in blood?
My vote for the dumbest crosswalk in Austin: East 45th Street between Avenue F and Avenue G (Shipe Park).
It's in the middle of the street, so car drivers are not expecting it. (This goes against the thesis of the article somewhat.) Drivers are also afraid to yield and get rear ended. I also think most Austinites don't know you are supposed to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk, blinking or not. Worse yet, a driver in the first lane yields and lures you in, but drivers in the other lanes keep going.
If you do dare to stop your car at a crosswalk, chances are the driver behind you is honking and screaming at you. This has happened to me too many times.
You can activate blinking lights before you cross, but drivers can barely see it during the day, so it gives a false sense of security.
Lots of people crossing with strollers as well. It looks like they are using their kids as "lightning rods" to avoid getting run over themselves.
The best part is there are no crosswalks at either corner. State law wouldn't allow something that sensible, let alone a stop light.
Runner ups: 43rd Street and Duval, Guadalupe across from Wheatsville.
To further broaden the conversation, here are email submissions I've received and facebook conversations about this article (posted with permission):
They're trying it in the Netherlands already...
http://www.rantrave.com/Rant/No-More-Traffic-Lights.aspx
-Dan
There was an article, "Distracting Miss Daisy" in the Atlantic last year that covered this. Very interesting. Also, consider for a moment that each traffic stop brings hundreds of tons of steel to a stop, and must burn fuel getting it moving again. Terribly inefficient.The funny thing is, I consider myself a conservative. I don't really respond to the "save the planet" stuff, but I find myself deeply offended by 40,000 traffic deaths a year and the unbelievable energy inefficiencies of our roadways.
-H.
In Nicaragua this is the way of things already. In Masaya where I spent most of my time there, the result was a sort of slow-speed, reasonably polite chaotic dance of taxis, trucks, pony carts, and motorcycles without a lot of smashing.
-Jen
I think the only reason this experiment in the Netherlands has been successful is due to the absence of Italian drivers.
-Dan
Drachten (the Netherlands)is a pretty obscure and really tiny place :) and of course, the Dutch are always vigilant for bikes that never pay attention to traffic lights whether they are there or not.By the way, Italian drivers drive a whole lot better than Texans in my experience...! Precisely because of the chaos on their roads - you HAVE to pay attention, and ... Read MoreAnticipate (magic word it seems, here in the States.. couldn't believe it the first time I saw someone STOP on a merging lane to get onto the highway because the cars on the highway all kept driving on the right..).
-Suzanne