naked streets
Naked streets refers to the concept of stripping a roadway of its signage—all of it, including stop signs, signals, and even stripes. Far from creating mayhem, this approach appears to have lowered crash rates wherever it has been tried.
p. 175 walkable cities – Jeff Speck referencing Hans Monderman
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His (Monderman’s) most famous design approach is the concept of “shared space“, an urban design approach that seeks to minimise demarcations between vehicle traffic and pedestrians, often by removing features such as kerbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and regulations. Monderman found that the traffic efficiency and safety improved when the street and surrounding public space was redesigned to encourage each person to negotiate their movement directly with others.
via shared space
First proposed in 1991, the term is now strongly associated to the work ofHans Monderman who suggested that by creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who had right of way, drivers reduce their speed, and everyone reduces their level of risk compensation. The approach is frequently opposed by organisations representing the interests ofblind, partially sighted and deaf who often express a strong preference for the clear separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic.
The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”
When you don’t exactly know who has right of way, you tend to seek eye contact with other road users.
via Hans Monderman
“To understand how shared space works, it is important to move away from reliance on ‘rights’ and laws, and to recognize the potential for conventions and protocols … Such conventions and protocols evolve rapidly and are very effective if the state does not intervene through regulation.
The introduction of such schemes have had positive effect on road safety, traffic volume, economic vitality, and community cohesion where a user’s behaviour becomes influenced and controlled by natural human interactions rather than by artificial regulation.
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perhaps getting us to stigmergic Baan ish self-organizing ness…
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How do we improve road safety in residential areas? The answer’s simple: make it riskier.
Naked streets is a concept developed by Dutch traffic engineer, Hans Monderman, who proposed that by creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who has right of way on a street, drivers reduce their speed and all street users increase their level of risk compensation. This last principle originates from behavioural theory that suggests people adjust their behaviour in response to the perceived level of risk: in riskier environments, pedestrian and drivers respond by behaving more safely.
In the past thirty years, naked streets have successfully been applied around the world. The concentration is highest in Europe: by 1999, there were 6,000 of them in the Netherlands; in 1991, London’s Kensington High Street was transformed into a shared space environment; the upgrade in 2011 of East Street in Horsham, Sussex, was a significant improvement over the existing car-dominated environment; projects have been successfully implemented in Denmark, Belgium, Germany, France, Sweden and Spain among others. An instructive video showing movement through one such project in Graz, Austria, can be viewed here.
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perhaps .. if we made ed policy simple/naked enough to be inclusive for everyone.. it would be the only policy we need.
imagine all the time/resources/people/energy/etc.. we would have/realize if we stripped ourselves back down to just us.
ps in the open ness
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be you. 