Citizen Think

Can you remove traffic signals and road signs and yet increase driver and pedestrian safety? Yes, says Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."

Take his intersection in Osterwoolde, Netherlands, formerly a conventional road junction with traffic lights. It now resembles a public square that mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000 cars pass through the square each day, with no serious accidents since the redesign five years earlier. "To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you." With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.

The excerpts above were written by Tom McNichol in an article for Wired magazine, Dec. 2004 issue, titled Roads Gone Wild.

Mark Steyn in his book America Alone cites Monderman's road design success to bring home his point that reducing government and enlarging citizen responsibility is vital to a nation's success. "Mr. Monderman's thesis feels right to me - that by creating the illusion of security you relieve the citizen of the need to make his own judgments... So on September 11 on those first three flights the cabin crews followed all those Federal Aviation Administration guidelines from the seventies. By the time the fourth plane got into trouble, the passengers knew the government wasn't up there with them. And, within ninety minutes of the first flight hitting the tower, the heroes of Flight 93 had figured out what was going on and came up with a way to stop it."