Some urban experts say stripping roads of lights and barriers, and encouraging ‘shared space’, could make them safer for all users

Imagine an alternative world without traffic rules, where you approach a junction and there’s no encouraging green light to get you on your way. Instead, all traffic is free, your movements aren’t controlled and all vehicles – regardless of the number of wheels or legs – have to interact with each other by instinct. Utopian madness? Chaos, confusion and traffic-clogged streets? Maybe not.

In a timelapse video of an intersection without any traffic signals in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, this apparent chaos has been captured in action.

Toy-like cars wind around one another on a busy highway, while people meander gracefully through the junction without directions from traffic lights. It all appears to run smoothly. Apparently humans can get by without the guidance from a machine. Or can they?

“What you’re observing is far from chaos,” says urban designer Ben Hamilton-Baillie. “There’s a very strong order implicit in the dynamics of that space, which is just different from the conventional state-controlled order of a traffic signal.

“The traffic signal does the thinking for the participants and controls that process, as opposed to a whole range of social protocols and accepted conventions that apply here – essentially, that you don’t run into anybody else.”

This isn’t some kind of libertarian social experiment. The idea of stripping roads of traffic lights, markings, stop signs and barriers is being adopted in cities across the world, and has been discussed in urban design circles for decades.

What you want is a bit of ambiguity, uncertainty, and it’s that that make those junctions work. Ben Hamilton-Baillie

The concept was first developed by Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who used it in his work as the head of road safety in Friesland in the 1980s. “Shared space” (a phrase coined by Hamilton-Baillie) essentially means that if physical traffic controls are removed, “road users will work it out for themselves in a civilised fashion”, says Prof John Adams of University College London.

In streets where this has already been implemented – from Germany to Japan to Israel – rather than increasing traffic collisions, road rage, fear and the negative emotions that come with the loss of order, it has in fact improved the appearance of roads, sociability – and even reduced road accidents in some cases.

Almost a year ago Amsterdam tried turning off traffic lights and removing safety barriers at a notorious junction at Alexanderplein. Instead of the anticipated chaos, the act improved the flow of traffic, and more than half of the road users said it had improved the junction.

“The usual engineering objectives of clarity and certainty are not the best things when you’re trying to deal with complexity [on a street],” says Hamilton-Baillie. “What you want is a bit of ambiguity, uncertainty, and it’s that that make those junctions work.”

Bern, Switzerland

Bern, Switzerland is another European city that decided to strip itself of rules and machines. The result, as the clip above shows, is that cars pass through more slowly, pedestrians cross from all points seemingly without confusion, and a man runs through the path of moving traffic without even looking. The road’s design slows “traffic to around 12mph ...[which changes] the balance between pedestrians and traffic”, says Hamilton-Baillie.

The urban designer adds: “The thing about the signals being removed is that the driver is no longer being given a green light. And what the green light does is to communicate to the driver that you’ve got priority here – you should be going ahead and you should be angry if grandma is on the road in front of you.

“But in normal circumstances we’d never be angry like that.” Instead, he says, “you’re much more open to the conventional protocols that we would if we were walking through a building, for example.”

Hanoi, Vietnam

Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, is particularly interestings, says Hamilton-Baillie, because of the high volume of pedestrian and moped traffic.

Road users, he adds, “have to be very conscious of other vehicles and people – that makes the videos themselves pretty fascinating. What you have to do as a pedestrian is simply walk, and walk predictably. And as soon as that happens then people can predict what your speed is.”

But as anyone who’s tried to cross paths with one of Vietnam’s mopeds knows, “it requires a degree of nerve the first time you do it”.

Delhi, India

In some developing countries such as India, you see what the urban designers calls a “natural shared space” on the roads. Rather than having had their traffic signals removed, in this case they have just never been installed.

In this video of Delhi, you see multiple interactions, some of which might seem amusing, says Hamilton-Baillie. “Engineers might call that conflict, but that’s what cities are about. What you’re seeing is interaction big time – people yelling at each other and having fun. The dynamics of human interaction, which is what replaces the state control of traffic signals, is what’s interesting about the shared space here.”

While UCL’s Professor Adams is an advocate for signal-free roads and rejects the conventional wisdom of traffic planners, he also argues that as much as we might marvel at the majestic flow of an Ethiopian road intersection, shared space is not appropriate everywhere.

“In the brief clip [of Addis Ababa] nobody gets knocked down, but in countries like that where there aren’t many cars per head, virtually everywhere is shared space – and they all have appalling road-death rates.”

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According to the World Health Organisation, Ethiopia has a road-death rate per motor vehicle almost 1,000 times higher than the UK (4984.3 per 100,000 vehicles). In India, it’s 130.1, while in Vietnam it is 55. In the UK the rate is 5.1.

This doesn’t dismiss the argument for ripping out traffic signals, argues Hamilton-Baillie. In countries with a more recent history of motorisation, “you would expect casualties to be pretty high”, he says. In fact, as the number of cars in countries rises, the death rate per car plummets – which Adams attributes to the idea that by “becoming more experienced with traffic on the road, we learn how to handle it better”.

“Since 1950, per vehicle, the UK has enjoyed a decline in fatality rates by over 96%,” he notes. “How much of the credit goes to the engineers, better breaks, better highways, and the legislators for drink-drive laws? I put most of my money on the cultural shift.”

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