An interesting experiment: by taking out the traffic lights the road engineers have lowered the death rate and increased the traffic flow:
Most traffic lights should be torn up as they make roads less safe, one of Europe’s leading road engineers said yesterday.
Hans
Monderman, a traffic planner involved in a Brussels-backed project
known as Shared Space, said that taking lights away helped motorists,
cyclists and pedestrians to co-exist more happily and safely.
How does this work? Surely removing the signals will lead to chaos?
There have been a few small collisions, but these are almost to be
encouraged, Mr Monderman explained. "We want small accidents, in order
to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt," he said yesterday.
"It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want.
But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to
the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.
Hhhm. Now that is an interesting result, isn’t it? This isn’t anarchy, there are still clear divisions between roads, cycle paths and pavements, you can’t just turn right across an open field. But within those borad limits, leaving people to their own devices to works things out as they wish leads to a spontaneous order which is more efficient (traffic moves faster, fewer serious accidents) than a more heavily planned one.
And that really is interesting, isn’t it? Scale it up to the economy: certainly, we need basic rules, property rights, means of contract enforcement and so on, but allowing people to create a spontaneous order within those very broad rules would lead, on the basis of this little experiment, to a more efficient economy. More of what people want as a result of fewer prescriptive rules.
You did notice that this is a Brussels backed program? Think they’ll heed the message? No, me neither.
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