Lots of Cars and Trucks, No Traffic Signs or Lights: Chaos or Calm? - Sarah Goodyear. No traffic lights. No traffic signs. No painted lines in the roadway. No curbs. And 26,000 vehicles passing every day through a traditional village center with busy pedestrian traffic. It’s called "shared space. " The village of Poynton in the U.K. has undertaken one of the most ambitious experiments to date in this type of street design, whose most prominent advocate was the Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. "Over the years, the increase in traffic and the steps taken to try to deal with that have changed this place from being the heart of the village into being merely a traffic-signal-controlled wasteland," said Ben Hamilton-Baillie, the street designer whose firm executed the change, before the work began. The project didn’t come cheap, costing about $6 million. It was a controversial move for the community of some 14,000 people, which lies about 11 miles from Manchester in the northwestern part of England.
"It has a very calming effect," says one resident in the film. The Physical Appearance of Intelligent Aliens. Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex. Architecture and urban planning. Europe Stifles Drivers in Favor of Mass Transit and Walking. Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Pedestrians and trams are given priority treatment in Zurich. Tram operators can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing cars to halt. More Photos » Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs.
Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter. Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces.
“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. Obama Unveils 53 Billion High-Speed Rail Plan via reddit.com. Anonymous Open letter To The World [Time to make the world what it should be!] via reddit.com. Socialism. Sustainability. Organic Metropolis via reddit.com.