[sustran] Re: World Bank on Dhaka transport

[townsend at alcor.concordia.ca]

The World Bank can be accused of many things, but inconsistency is not one of 
them! The Dhaka recommendations are by-the-book 1950s American Urban Transport 
Planning. As others have identified (see Dimitriou, 1992;  Vasconcellos, 2001; 
Mees, 1999), the World Bank and international consultants have been exporting 
this model to developing countries for some time now. Beginning in the 1970s, 
similar recommendations were made, and to some extent followed, in Asian 
cities such as Bangkok (where rickshaws were banished to the suburbs and 
electric streetcars were dismantled) and Kuala Lumpur (where large scale road-
building and low capacity owner-operated minibuses were introduced). 

The fact that high-density, low-income cities such as Dhaka will never be able 
to accommodate widespread and fast motor vehicle movement is not enough to 
dissuade the World Bank experts from using the same old manual. Ironically, 
while the wisdom of segregating traffic is now being questioned in the US 
where these types of policies have been pursued for decades (see story pasted 
in below), they are now being enthusiastically promoted in places like Dhaka. 
I suppose this is what we would expect from an institution whose lending 
activities are directly accountable to only one elected body (the US 
Congress). I propose that the desire of Dhaka officials to build metros and 
expressways (identified by Karl) is based on the realistic assumption that 
they will be given access to big money to pursue those capital-intensive 
projects while there will be little in the way of funds for NMT. 

Regards,
Craig Townsend

>From Wired magazine, December 2004 
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html?pg=2&topic=(none)
&topic_set=(none)

Roads Gone Wild: No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: 
Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer.
By Tom McNichol

  Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. 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. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - 
literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble 
with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always 
try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove 
things." 

Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer - equal 
parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and psychologist. The 
approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem dangerous, and 
they'll be safer. 

Monderman and I are tooling around the rural two-lane roads of northern 
Holland, where he works as a road designer. He wants to show me a favorite 
intersection he designed. 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. 

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. He's worked as a civil engineer and traffic specialist for more than 
30 years and, for a time, ran his own driving school. 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. 

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. We pass by the performing 
arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. It's the confluence 
of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of 
bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the 
traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver 
behavior - traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings - and 
in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is 
remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how 
fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane 
markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where 
the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, 
the intersection is utterly ambiguous - and that's the point. 

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, 
watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way 
through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all 
works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and 
walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. 
Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake 
screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. "I love it!" Monderman says at 
last. "Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, 
the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, 
and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and 
street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into 
the design of the road."

It's no surprise that the Dutch, a people renowned for social experimentation 
in practically every facet of life, have embraced new ideas in traffic 
management. But variations of Monderman's less-is-more approach to traffic 
engineering are spreading around the globe, showing up in Austria, Denmark, 
France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US.

In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and signals 
from its major intersection and cut the number of serious or fatal accidents a 
year from three to zero. In England, towns in Suffolk and Wiltshire have 
removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort to slow traffic - experts 
call it "psychological traffic calming." A dozen other towns in the UK are 
looking to do the same. A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted 
by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found 
that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 
percent decrease in the number of accidents.

In the US, traffic engineers are beginning to rethink the dictum that the car 
is king and pedestrians are well advised to get the hell off the road. In West 
Palm Beach, Florida, planners have redesigned several major streets, removing 
traffic signals and turn lanes, narrowing the roadbed, and bringing people and 
cars into much closer contact. The result: slower traffic, fewer accidents, 
shorter trip times. "I think the future of transportation in our cities is 
slowing down the roads," says Ian Lockwood, the transportation manager for 
West Palm Beach during the project and now a transportation and design 
consultant. "When you try to speed things up, the system tends to fail, and 
then you're stuck with a design that moves traffic inefficiently and is 
hostile to pedestrians and human exchange."

The common thread in the new approach to traffic engineering is a recognition 
that the way you build a road affects far more than the movement of vehicles. 
It determines how drivers behave on it, whether pedestrians feel safe to walk 
alongside it, what kinds of businesses and housing spring up along it. "A wide 
road with a lot of signs is telling a story," Monderman says. "It's saying, go 
ahead, don't worry, go as fast as you want, there's no need to pay attention 
to your surroundings. And that's a very dangerous message."

We drive on to another project Monderman designed, this one in the nearby 
village of Oosterwolde. What was once a conventional road junction with 
traffic lights has been turned into something resembling a public square that 
mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000 cars pass through the 
square each day, with no serious accidents since the redesign in 1999. "To my 
mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman 
says. "Here, I will show you." 

With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into 
the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see 
oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease 
around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his 
convictions. 

>From the beginning, a central premise guiding American road design was that 
driving and walking were utterly incompatible modes of transport, and that the 
two should be segregated as much as possible. 

The planned suburban community of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 as "a 
town for the motor age," took the segregation principle to its logical 
extreme. Radburn's key design element was the strict separation of vehicles 
and people; cars were afforded their own generously proportioned network, 
while pedestrians were tucked safely away in residential "super blocks," which 
often terminated in quiet cul de sacs. Parents could let kids walk to the 
local school without fearing that they might be mowed down in the street. 
Radburn quickly became a template for other communities in the US and Britain, 
and many of its underlying assumptions were written directly into traffic 
codes. 

The psychology of driver behavior was largely unknown. Traffic engineers 
viewed vehicle movement the same way a hydraulics engineer approaches water 
moving through a pipe - to increase the flow, all you have to do is make the 
pipe fatter. Roads became wider and more "forgiving" - roadside trees were cut 
down and other landscape elements removed in an effort to decrease fatalities. 
Road signs, rather than road architecture, became the chief way to enforce 
behavior. Pedestrians, meanwhile, were kept out of the traffic network 
entirely or limited to defined crossing points.

The strict segregation of cars and people turned out to have unintended 
consequences on towns and cities. Wide roads sliced through residential areas, 
dividing neighborhoods, discouraging pedestrian activity, and destroying the 
human scale of the urban environment.

The old ways of traffic engineering - build it bigger, wider, faster - aren't 
going to disappear overnight. But one look at West Palm Beach suggests an 
evolution is under way. When the city of 82,000 went ahead with its plan to 
convert several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way streets, traffic slowed 
so much that people felt it was safe to walk there. The increase in pedestrian 
traffic attracted new shops and apartment buildings. Property values along 
Clematis Street, one of the town's main drags, have more than doubled since it 
was reconfigured. "In West Palm, people were just fed up with the way things 
were, and sometimes, that's what it takes," says Lockwood, the town's former 
transportation manager. "What we really need is a complete paradigm shift in 
traffic engineering and city planning to break away from the conventional 
ideas that have got us in this mess. There's still this notion that we should 
build big roads everywhere because the car represents personal freedom. Well, 
that's bullshit. The truth is that most people are prisoners of their cars." 
Today some of the most car-oriented areas in the US are rethinking their 
approaches to traffic, mainly because they have little choice. "The old way 
doesn't work anymore," says Gary Toth, director of project planning and 
development for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. The 2004 Urban 
Mobility Report, published by the respected Texas Transportation Institute, 
shows that traffic congestion is growing across the nation in towns and cities 
of all sizes. The study's conclusion: It's only going to get worse.

Instead of widening congested highways, New Jersey's DOT is urging neighboring 
or contiguous towns to connect their secondary streets and add smaller centers 
of development, creating a series of linked minivillages with narrow roads, 
rather than wide, car-choked highways strewn with malls. "The cities that 
continue on their conventional path with traffic and land use will harm 
themselves, because people with a choice will leave," says Lockwood. "They'll 
go to places where the quality of life is better, where there's more human 
exchange, where the city isn't just designed for cars. The economy is going to 
follow the creative class, and they want to live in areas that have a sense of 
place. That's why these new ideas have to catch on. The folly of traditional 
traffic engineering is all around us."

Back in Holland, Monderman is fighting his own battle against the folly of 
traditional traffic engineering, one sign at a time. "Every road tells a 
story," Monderman says. "It's just that so many of our roads tell the story 
poorly, or tell the wrong story."

As the new approach to traffic begins to take hold in the US, the road ahead 
is unmarked and ambiguous. Hans Monderman couldn't be happier.

How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation
1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road - not signs and signals - 
dictates traffic flow.
2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the 
intersection is. 
3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also the 
pedestrian areas.
4. Do it in the road: Cafés extend to the edge of the street, further 
emphasizing the idea of shared space.
5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, rather 
than commonly ignored signs.
6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by texture 
and color.
Contributing editor Tom McNichol (mcnichol at pacbell.net) wrote about bowling in 
issue 12.09.