“Who needs traffic lights?” is the name of the YouTube video shown below. It shows an intersection in Ethiopia in which some fourteen lanes of traffic cross six more, with pedestrians wandering amidst vehicles turning right, left, and going straight unhampered by signals, signs, or seemingly any conventions other than to drive on the right.
This video seems to support proposals by many urban planners that streets would be safer if there were fewer, not more, signals and signs. At the extreme is the late Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic planner who advocated getting rid of street signs, signals, and crosswalks.
There’s one slight problem with using Ethiopia as an example of sound traffic management: that nation, reports Newsweek, has the highest auto fatality rate in the world. This is supported by a country-by-country comparison on Wikipedia that shows more than 11,000 annual fatalities per hundred thousand vehicles. Bangladesh is second-highest at 6,300; the United States has just 15. (Fatalities per billion vehicle miles of travel might be a better indicator, but such data are not available for most countries.)
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The United States once had traffic rules–or a lack of them–similar to Ethiopia’s today. In 1899, a 40-year-old New York realtor named William Eno got so fed up with the resulting congestion and unsafe conditions that he retired and devoted the rest of his life to improving traffic flows and safety. Eno wrote the first “rules of the road,” which were soon adopted by New York City, and invented the stop sign, one-way streets, and traffic circles.
Since Eno, traffic engineers have introduced many improvements, including the invention of traffic signals. Each of these improvements were followed by careful before-and-after or with-and-without tests. For example, though Eno conceived of one-way streets, they did not become popular until after World War II when cities found that they significantly increased throughput while at the same time they reduced accidents by 30 percent or more.
In recent decades, however, urban planners have proposed significant changes in street design without doing any before-and-after or with-and-without tests. In the name of improving safety, these changes significantly reduce the ability of streets to move traffic. Collectively, these ideas are known as “traffic calming,” but often they don’t improve safety: for example, many cities are converting one-way streets back to two-way operation even though they know that this will increase accidents by 30 percent or more.
The fact that Monderman’s ideas are considered a form of traffic calming hints that the real agenda is not safety but reducing traffic flows and discouraging driving. Certainly, increasing traffic fatalities by 700 times current levels would discourage auto driving, but it is not really a sound policy.
