Is this the end of the road for traffic lights?:
Residents of the northern Dutch town of Drachten have already been used as guinea-pigs in an experiment which has seen nearly all the traffic lights stripped from their streets.Only three of the 15 sets in the town of 50,000 remain and they will be gone within a couple of years.
The project is the brainchild of Mr Monderman, and the town has seen some remarkable results. There used to be a road death every three years but there have been none since the traffic light removal started seven years ago.
There have been a few small collisions, but these are almost to be encouraged, Mr Monderman explained. “We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt,” he said yesterday.
“It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.
“We only want traffic lights where they are useful and I haven’t found anywhere where they are useful yet.”
Mr Monderman, 61, compared his philosophy of motoring to an ice rink. “Skaters work out things for themselves and it works wonderfully well. I am not an anarchist, but I don’t like rules which are ineffective and street furniture tells people how to behave.”
In short, if motorists are made more wary about how they drive, they behave more carefully, he said.
The main junction in Drachten handles about 22,000 cars a day. Where once there were traffic lights, there is a roundabout, an extended cycle path and pedestrian area.
In the days of traffic lights, progress across the junction was slow as cars stopped and started. Now tailbacks are almost unheard of — and almost nobody toots a horn.
I’ve written about Monderman’s ideas before.