With Sunday's NYTimes story about robot Google cars driving us around on their own still popping in my head, I saw someone randomly tweet this video about how removing the traffic lights around a traffic circle in Bristol, England actually improved traffic conditions.
This result is familiar by now. The earliest version of the experiment I am aware of was in the Dutch town of Drachten in which removing the traffic lights and signs (see also "naked streets") counterintuitively resulted in fewer people (actually no one) crashing into each other.
Since then the idea has swept Europe. I think London was the first real city to try it out but if you Google around you'll find examples all over the world.
Other places, like La Paz, Bolivia, are employing more novel approaches to further snap drivers out of the impersonal bubble that car driving can induce. The photo above is from a similar effort in Moscow.
As the How We Drive blog explains, the idea is "to use novelty and interest to remind drivers they are in a human environment." Which brings me to the source of my consternation: It would seem that reminding drivers that they're actual human beings operating in a human environment, performing a manual task, causes them to engage in the activity with greater care and attention. It seems reasonable to conclude that sitting in what have become sound-proof, rolling living rooms degrades our ability to actually drive. And yet here's this really great-sounding solution in the Google robot-car, paying better attention, always mindful of safety, and it comes through the total abandonment of the humanity of driving and its associated flaws, rather than the promotion of driving like a human.
Remember when Rachel used to do the "talk me down" segments? I'm happy to have someone talk me down on this.
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Americans are aggressive drivers and seem to always be in a hurry. These examples are all outside of the United States, except some small towns here in the US do not have traffic lights, but the townsfolk already know the rules of the road. We could implement it here, but there would be accidents and casualties until we big city folks learn the rules of the road.
I have confession though, I am not the best driver in the world, and have cut people off.
Perhaps the natural selection process would be at work to cull out bad drivers from the gene pool....
Personally I find the drivers of Massachusetts to be the worst in the US. They pull out into traffic without regard for their safety or the safety of others around them, do not know how to merge, and are just all-around driving idiots. There is a reason they are named Ma$$holes....
That image is of someone taking things way too literally.