‘Shared Space’ Design: Road Signs Suck. What If We Got Rid of Them All?

Here in Phnom Penh, for all intents and purposes there are no rules of the road. So there are no sidewalks. Sidewalks are for rich people to park their monster second-hand imported American gas guzzlers. Going up the wrong side in the wrong direction of the road? No problem. Do you want to do a U turn from slow lane on a 4 lane highway -- stopping all traffic to do so is the way to do it. What you find is that it&#x27;s the 3% of assholes who make a mess for everyone else.<p>In Thailand people follow the rules a bit more, but they drive recklessly at insane speeds. If you&#x27;re a teenager, it&#x27;s not cool to use headlights at night and the first thing you do is remove your mirrors, which no one uses anyway....<p>But if you go over the border into Laos there are no rules there either, but traffic is completely different from Thailand or Cambodia. People drive slowly, patiently and politely. Lao drivers even put the Japanese to shame and that&#x27;s a pretty high bar. Laos is a very laid back place. It&#x27;s too much effort for most people to not do otherwise.<p>Over the last twenty years I&#x27;ve seen things changing in both mainland China and in Thailand. People are slowly internalizing the rules of the road and following them more with each new generation. You stay in your lane, and your side of the road. You don&#x27;t run stop signs. You wait for the traffic light to chain to green (or blue in Japan) before you cross a road.<p>What it comes down to is that rules of the road and road behavior is a collective body of knowledge that takes time to develop in a society. Once that knowledge has been internalized and becomes the cultural norm, then getting rid of traffic signs can work. But there is a learning curve to master that body of knowledge and a correspondingly greater responsibility that goes with it.

I wonder to what extent the reduced accident rate is due to change rather than &#x27;Shared Space&#x27; being a better design. The same thing happened when Sweden switched from driving on the left side of the road to the right. Accident rates initially dropped but soon rebounded to prior levels.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dagen_H" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dagen_H</a>

Oh, that idea. It got a lot of press in the 1990s when some town in France tried it. When Redwood City rebuilt their downtown, &quot;Theater Way&quot;, in front of the movie theaters, was built with a curb on one side and no curb on the other.[1] Restaurants along both sides were allowed to expand onto the sidewalk and beyond.<p>The result was a mess. Cars too close to restaurant tables with no barrier. Heavy planters were put in place. That helped some. Finally, traffic was blocked off at both ends, and it became entirely a pedestrian area. As a pedestrian area, it works well. But no one can be dropped off right in front of the theater.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;citydesigncollective.com&#x2F;urban-design-services&#x2F;streetscape-design&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;citydesigncollective.com&#x2F;urban-design-services&#x2F;street...</a>

Shared space doesn&#x27;t really work except for places with very little traffic, and there only if the streets are small enough to make driving difficult and unpleasant. The Dutch model of providing safe, separated spaces for cycling and walking is a proven success.

What if we got rid of them all? It turns out that when you remove demarcations between pedestrians and vehicles, people end up in hospital:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dezeen.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;exhibition-road-accident-review-shared-vehicle-pedestrian-space-emma-dent-coad-london-uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dezeen.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;exhibition-road-accident-r...</a><p>Who would have thought?

I suspect this works in a homogeneous culture where everyone has the same concepts of queues, taking turns, and aversion to line cutting. But in a heterogenous culture with a mix of people who prioritize self over taking turns and regularly ignore queues, this would quickly become a disaster.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, there were no signs, signals, or lane markers. It was a true shared space with cars, pedestrians, and even horses, since cars were so new. However, over many generations, safety concerns caused our traffic system to evolve in what we have today.<p>Rapidly going back to the original anarchy may have an initial success due to the novelty of it, but I think we should not give up on the system that has evolved successfully over time.<p>Also, we are about to embark on a fundamental redesign of our traffic system with autonomous vehicles, so maybe we should wait and see.

&gt; The concept is that the absence of separation will make everyone more cautious — so commuters slow down, make eye contact, and negotiate.<p>That&#x27;s a part of town that I think I&#x27;d just avoid when possible, and hate when I couldn&#x27;t avoid it. It sounds confusing and nerve-wracking. Most people are reasonable. The rest are terrifying, when they&#x27;re in a car and you&#x27;re on foot.

The Poynton example seems strange. Maybe the signs as such were removed, but what they did was basically to convert from an intersection with lights to a roundabout. The roundabout clearly exists, even if the sign doesn&#x27;t. People in the UK know very well how to default to that behaviour, so I wouldn&#x27;t say it&#x27;s really a shared space.

Belgium has what I consider a very bad system of priority from the right. Often what this means is that they just don&#x27;t bother to put in any signs on junctions where they can&#x27;t be bothered. Then who ever comes from the right has priority.<p>The problem is that this is similar to having a mini roundabout (which are fairly common in the UK), but there as with regular roundabouts in Belgium the priority is from the left.<p>Further this is made worse by what seems to be very little desire of the Belgian drivers to consistently follow the law. So some police will use priority from the right, some won&#x27;t. Some drivers are very agressive with it some aren&#x27;t. Some look some don&#x27;t.<p>Some junctions have had the lines fade, so it looks like there is no preference but in fact there is.<p>On some roads you have a straight wide road and a small street from the right that has priority.<p>Personally I find all this confusion just makes driving far more stressful than it is compared to the UK. There every junction (except for this &#x27;shared spaces&#x27;) are all clearly marked.<p>There is also a big difference in the UK that, from what I have seen, the drivers there follow the rules much better. But I suspect some of this comes down to the extra frustration that the average Belgian driver has to go through.

&quot;The concept is that the absence of separation will make everyone more cautious — so commuters slow down, make eye contact, and negotiate.&quot;<p>Where I live, we are moving steadily in the &quot;fuck you, I&#x27;m special&quot; direction, so this isn&#x27;t likely to work until we have autonomous vehicles.

Oh, so this explains one of the worst intersections in Berlin. I always wondered, why there were no street signs etc. at Checkpoint Charlie, one of the biggest tourist attractions here. After reading&#x2F;watching the article and researching it online, it seems that it was converted into a &quot;shared space&quot; in 2014&#x2F;2015, shortly before I moved to Berlin.<p>It might be just a bad implementation of the concept because you have a little vision into the other streets at the intersection, or because it is such a crowded space at any time, but the status quo is utter chaos. I&#x27;ve personally seen many near-accidents there, and I go out of my way to avoid it.

Hopefully we don&#x27;t get rid of the &#x27;Bridge Out Ahead&#x27; signs.

Works in small places without much traffic, more laid-back and reasonable people, in a bright summer day only.<p>Basically, solves the issue of traffic when the traffic is not an issue.

How do blind people navigate these spaces?

I&#x27;d be very curious to see these discussions also take into account the road situation in countries other than those in Europe and the US. I&#x27;ve heard many a tale of driving conditions in—just for example—the dense urban areas of India that would turn this assumption completely on its head.

Cars and the internal combustion engine coupled with easy finance is the problem. Cars as we have them today have to go and the new self-driving robot cars powered on electricity really do have to take over soon.<p>I can go out and spend £££ hiring a fancy car today and spend the next three years crawling around town looking for somewhere to park the thing, spewing fumes into the faces of the kids going to school. So long as I pay the taxes nobody is going to complain about the noise and pollution.<p>Is it not possible for at least one country on planet earth to restrict the total number of ICE cars? If you had to scrap a car to buy a new car then the total number of cars would not go up, the roads would not get any heavier for people who already have a car so there is self interest for everyone. New electric self-driving options could cater for young people who do not already own cars.<p>Coupled with this there could be a reduction in on-street parking, so you can then have roads that can be safe for cyclists and not lined with tin boxes on each side.