Andy
: ?James Fallows writes, "My reaction to this and innumerable similar signs in China has become sympathy rather than anything else (frustration, mirth, etc.)." But my reaction is a strange kind of delight in the indirect, vaguely poetic result of this mistranslation.?
Andy
: ?If you haven't noticed, as Christmas approaches we're having a little extra fun, along with the serious stuff. Three cheers for bureaucracies with a sense of humor.?
Andy
: ?Spotted in Southern California. Of course.?
Nate
: ?Just need to add: love, community, and maybe a bit of typesetting.?
Nate
: ?It is, after all, backpacks week at Culture Making. I don't think of the Prince of Wales as being much of a backpacker (except in the sense of toting your watercolors across the deer park). But then again I don't much think of Braveheart when I want to check my email, either.?
Nate
: ?Note that when there are fewer traffic signs, suddenly there are more driver (and rider) signals -- people apparently become both more aware of their environment and more eager to share that awareness with others.?Monderman certainly changed the landscape in the provincial city of Drachten, with the project that, in 2001, made his name. At the town center, in a crowded four-way intersection called the Laweiplein, Monderman removed not only the traffic lights but virtually every other traffic control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, “traffic islands,” and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout (a “squareabout,” in his words, because it really seemed more a town square than a traditional roundabout), marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by law.
As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn’t struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process—stop, go—the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.
A year after the change, the results of this “extreme makeover” were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection—buses spent less time waiting to get through, for example—but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using signals—of the electronic or hand variety—more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman’s ears. If they had not felt less secure, he said, he “would have changed it immediately.”