MemeMachineGo!

Why don’t we do it in the road?

It’s rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and fatality free.

In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. “There are no rules,” as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads.

But here’s the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I didn’t see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets. On the contrary, the urban arterials are a communal mix of automobiles, cyclists, pedestrians, and small businesses such as inner-tube repairmen that set up shop directly in the right-of-way. […]

Education campaigns [in the UK and US] from the 1960s onward were based on maintaining a clear separation between the highway and the rest of the public realm. Children were trained to modify their behavior and, under pain of death, to stay out of the street. “But as soon as you emphasize separation of functions, you have a more dangerous environment,” says Hamilton-Baillie. “Because then the driver sees that he or she has priority. And the child who forgets for a moment and chases a ball across the street is a child in the wrong place.”

Any attempt to suggest traffic anarchy that works in China and Holland would work in the U.S. would remind me of gun advocates pointing to the example of Switzerland. Yes, in Switzerland, every man is armed, and their society is fairly peaceable. Thus, say some gun advocates, the problem in our violent society is not enough guns — if only everyone had one, things would be ducky.

The thing is, though, they’re not just armed, they’re Swiss. They grew up in a different society, in a different context. I find the suggestion that the U.S. would be more peaceable if every man in America woke up with a loaded rifle under his bed tomorrow to be fanciful. No, I don’t. I find it to be moronic.

Likewise, as someone who’s been shouted at to “get off the road” and had garbage thrown at him by someone in a car while riding my bike on one of Berkeley’s bike boulevards, I don’t think removing traffic controls would make American drivers forget the idea of their undying primacy.

Mind you, I’m not saying the article makes the claim that it’d be a great idea for the U.S., ‘cause it doesn’t.

For their part, many American traffic engineers say one critical ingredient is missing for a system built around shared spaces to work in the United States: a communal sensibility. “We live in a culture that gives so much value to the individual and the expression of that is how we act in a car,” says Robert Burchfield, a city traffic engineer in my home town of Portland, Ore., which is nationally recognized for its preservation of public space and its dedicated network of cycling lanes and pedestrian pathways. “I’m not comfortable with less order when I can’t get people to go below 50 or 60 miles per hour.”

(Via The Null Device)