It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. Riding in his green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. Droll and reserved, he's easy to underestimate - but his ideas on road design, safety, and city planning are being adopted from Scandinavia to the Sunshine State. He's worked as a civil engineer and traffic specialist for more than 30 years and, for a time, ran his own driving school. Wearing a striped tie and crisp blue blazer with shiny gold buttons, Monderman looks like the sort of stout, reliable fellow you'd see on a package of pipe tobacco. It's a busy junction that doesn't contain a single traffic signal, road sign, or directional marker, an approach that turns eight decades of traditional traffic thinking on its head. He wants to show me a favorite intersection he designed. Monderman and I are tooling around the rural two-lane roads of northern Holland, where he works as a road designer. The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they'll be safer. Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer - equal parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and psychologist. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things." "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |