Too much safety can be dangerous

The Sunday of September the 3rd was a special day for Swedes. From one o’clock in the night until six in the morning all road traffic was suspended, except for emergency vehicles, and even these had to follow special regulations. At 4:30 am every single vehicle had to come to a stop. In the following thirty minutes, all the roads in Sweden received a drastic makeover. That Sunday, Swedes switched from driving on the left side of the road to the right.

Planning this important change in Sweden had taken several years. In 1955 there was even a referendum in which more than 80 percent of voters opted against switching sides. However, despite the will of the people, the expert and practical arguments were too convincing to allow Swedes to continue driving “the English way”. What contributed the most to the decision was the fact that, in all the neighboring countries, people drove on the right lane. In addition to that, most of the cars in Sweden already had a left-sided steering wheel, so the decision to switch the direction of driving was just a matter of time.

Contrary to expectations, this great and important change of traffic regulations that took place on “H-Day” (H for höger, meaning right), as that first September Sunday of 1967 was named, did not result in a higher number of traffic accidents. Quite the opposite: on the Monday after the change of directions had been implemented, the number of the accidents recorded was actually lower than the daily average up to that time. It took a whole year until the average number of car crashes rose back to the average before “H-Day”.

The paradox of perceiving safety

In his book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What it Says About Us (Allen Lane, 2008), one of the questions Tom Vanderbilt asks himself is how an actual increase of danger on the road, like that which took place in Sweden in 1967, can decrease the number of accidents. The answer is, of course, quite simple: because of the change in the direction of driving on the roads, people felt less safe and therefore drove more carefully. After a year, when they became used to the new regulations, they became more confident in their driving again and the number of accidents rose back to the previous level.

On the basis of additional examples, Vanderbilt concluded that in perceiving road danger we face a paradox: “The system that the majority perceives to be more dangerous is in fact safer, while the system that seems safer is actually more dangerous.”

The explanation of this paradox is that people adjust their road behavior according to the feeling of risk or danger involved. If they perceive something as dangerous they will naturally be more careful than when they feel like nothing bad can happen to them. When, for example, the green traffic light turns on, most drivers feel that, at least for a few moments, they own the road ahead and do not need to think about anything but stepping on the gas pedal. If a road is constructed like a racetrack the people using it will accelerate and drive faster even if there are speed limit signs on the side, because such a road will make them feel safe. Similarly, people who drive to work taking the same road on daily basis drive much faster than tourists driving through for the first time, which is completely understandable, as locals know their route in detail and therefore feel much safer.

There are several approaches to planning and building roads. According to the theory of passive security, roads should be built in such a way that potential mistakes made by drivers would not cause severe consequences. This way of building could be called “the engineering approach” as it tries to take into account in advance the potential errors made by drivers, much like builders and architects have to consider the possibility of an earthquake or violent winds. The problem with this approach is that it does not take into consideration the fact that there is a major difference between an earthquake and a dangerous driver. The earthquake does not “know” that people have begun building more solid structures, so it will not become more violent than it was even before they had started to build earthquake-proof buildings. Drivers, however, are a different story. On a “safely” built road they tend to feel much less threatened, so they drive accordingly which, in the end, can result in even more accidents than if the road is not built as “safe”.

One of the pioneers of a completely new approach to road planning and traffic signalization was the recently deceased Dutchman Hans Monderman, who is also introduced by Vanderbilt in his book. His approach to regulating traffic is the complete opposite of the aforementioned “engineering approach” which suggests predicting the drivers’ mistakes and adjusting the road plan accordingly. Monderman, on the other hand, does not think of himself as an engineer but as an architect because he bears in mind that, in traffic, he is not dealing with natural forces but with people.

The essence of his theory is represented by two types of spaces one encounters when building roads and streets. The first is the “traffic space” which is best represented by the freeway and is built exclusively for vehicles and enables an efficient traffic flow. According to Monderman, the best example of this type of space is the German “autobahn”. Typical environments representing the other basic type of space are city and village centers, which he calls “shared space”. Here, the vehicle is only a “guest” or, in the best case, an equal to the other participants in traffic, such as pedestrians, cyclists, children, domestic animals and others.

According to Monderman, the crucial mistake committed by classic traffic engineers is that they try to transfer the rules and standardization from the traffic space to the shared space. The abundance of traffic signs, road markings and other types of signalization in cities and villages transposes the rules from the world of cars into the world of pedestrians. If the road outside a village is designed in the same way as the road inside the village, only with a speed limit sign, people will only drive slower if they are afraid of police control. That is why Monderman suggested a radical solution: the shared space in city and village centers should be altogether without any kind of traffic signalization.

The road as a space of participation

Monderman first tested his ideas in several Dutch villages and towns. In the village Oudehaske he tried to make the main road as “rural” as possible, and after it was rearranged, tested it by measuring speed. He wanted to find out whether the perception of the road really exerts such a strong influence on drivers. When measuring the speed of cars he was at first convinced that his laser speed gun did not work, but he quickly realized what the problem was. Everyone was driving under 30 km/h and the gun does not detect such low speeds.

In his test village Monderman deliberately did not try to arrange the traffic, but intentionally made it more complex by putting pedestrians, cars and cyclists together. The drivers no longer felt as comfortable on this road, and had to communicate with other people on the road all the time.
Reassured by his initial successes, he decided to take on bigger challenges in cities. In the city of Drachten he rearranged an intersection which made him famous around the world. Although it was an important city intersection through which up to twenty thousand vehicles drove each day together with a large number of pedestrians and cyclists, he removed all traffic lights and signs, and reduced the road markings to a minimum. However, he did not leave the space entirely empty. He added a series of fountains that detect traffic density and squirt the water higher when a larger number of vehicles are present in the intersection. He put a round green plot in the center of the intersection to create a sort of a roundabout, but one in which motor vehicles could not be dominant. All the traffic participants that meet in the roundabout have to communicate with one another and negotiate their way through. Despite the fact that the intersection also includes a driveway to a shopping mall, the traffic is completely fluent, and even more so than it was before, when traffic lights ruled the intersection.

On Youtube you can have a look at videos of traffic in intersections and on roads that Monderman had rearranged according to his principles. The approach to such “psychological” traffic arrangement immediately received the name “shared space”. Monderman trusted his approach to the extent that he answered a journalist’s questions right in the middle of the road and had no problem with walking through his intersection backwards or with his eyes shut. He knew that, because of the way the road and the intersection were arranged, drivers would pay equal attention to all the traffic participants and would not feel annoyed if someone would get in their way; they would even adjust to a weirdo crossing the road backwards.