Okay, good thing I’m not dressed for work yet, because this crack by Simon made me snarf. He’s referring to PRC crackdowns on Chinese citizens who go to casinos over the border:

There’s actually no need for casinos in China. If they want to gamble, they’ve got roads.

That, in turn, put me in mind of an article that ran in Salon last spring by one Linda Baker, whose civil engineering legacy will be to have proffered the following paragraphs without a trace of irony:

As it turns out, I’m far from the first person to think along these lines. In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It’s called “second generation” traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and — of all subjects — evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it’s a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty*. In practice, it’s about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play. [Now, what kind of fuddy-duddies could stir up a controversy about that?–SRK]



For the past 50 years, the American approach to traffic safety has been dominated by the “triple E” paradigm: engineering, enforcement and education. And yet, the idea of the street as a flexible community space is a provocative one in the United States, precisely because other “traditional” modes of transportation — light rail, streetcars and bicycles — are making a comeback in cities across the country. The shared-street concept is also intriguing for the way it challenges one of the fundamental tenets of American urban planning: that to create safe communities, you have to control them.

Ms. Baker, you will doubtless be surprised to hear, lives in Portland, Oregon, which puts her statements about the “comebacks” made by light rail and other non-automobile forms of transportation in a strange light.



What this has to do with Simon’s quip, before I forget to tell you (which is always a danger with my scatty, free-associative mind), is that Ms. Baker spent a week observing the city of Suzhou in China, where the populace is unfettered by “dominant-paradigm” rules expressed through signs, color-coded curbs, and traffic cops. And she didn’t see a single accident, even though she was totally paying attention, like, the whole week. Who knows? It’s possible that, in all of China, there are enough yearly traffic fatalities to depopulate Peoria, but none of them happens in Suzhou because its traffic non-system really works. But why is it that what Baker describes still sounds like a hopeful dress-up of the usual traffic free-for-all seen in population centers in developing countries?



It’s a shame that Baker and the brothers-in-arms she quotes tend toward the post-structuralist-Mad Libs mode of expression (“subvert the dominant paradigm,” “give expression to the suppressed voice,” and “communal,” “communal,” “communal” until I’m going out of my mind), because they’re making some points that aren’t as risible as they make them sound. When you’re accustomed to following the signs and lights, you really do go on autopilot, and that is, in fact, a source of danger. When I’m back at my parents’ place, I always have to remind myself on my first day of driving not to get too comfy, because within a ten-mile stretch, you can go from twisty back roads with Deer Crossing signs to a clogged intersection in downtown Allentown to the notorious Route 22, where you’re jockeying for position with truckers like a video game come to life. I also take a lot of shortcuts when going through the town in which I grew up, the Borough of Emmaus, which has a population of 12,000 and is almost entirely residential.



Baker is talking about urban areas, but it’s neighborhoods with a lot of houses that she seems most concerned with. Speed limits of 25 or 30 mph seem slow to impatient drivers, but they’re actually just above the speeds at which a pedestrian who gets hit is unlikely to be seriously injured. Couple that with the fact that most people go a good 5 or 10 mph over the speed limit, anyway, and add in the way marking streets as cars-only territory puts drivers off their guard against a child who bikes or runs out into their lane, and…well, you can see dangers that might be addressed by mixing types of traffic.



Might. I suspect that the sort of intersection Baker is hot on works just fine in relatively small-scale neighborhoods within larger cities where everyone already knows the rules from before (as in the Netherlands) or everyone is used to improvising the rules because the idea of clear, impersonal rule of law is a fantasy throughout the larger society (as in the PRC). It’s possible to imagine that it could work in Portland, where I gather residents are in general more receptive to these sorts of experiments. I just hope they get into the habit of warning us visiting Bos-Wash types at the airport car rental counter, though.

* Don’t you love this particular polarity? “Certainty”–also known as “having some idea what the motley crew of speeders, pokers, weavers, clinically-diagnosed turnsignalophobes, tailgaters, daydreamers, and let’s-play-chicken brakers with whom you’re sharing the roadway are going to do and where”–is bad because it separates people from vehicular traffic. Trying to negotiate an intersection of random peds and cyclists and cars and peddlers sitting in lotus position is not “anxiety-provoking” or “nerve-racking.” It’s “intriguing.” Turns commuting into a regular Marlene Dietrich movie.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2005 at 10:53 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.