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Eliminating Traffic Lights: Dutch Town Experiments with Anarchy on the Road
The Dutch town of Drachten has been systematically eliminating all traffic lights per the recommendation of road engineer Hans Monderman. Though a small town of only 50,000, twelve of the original fifteen sets of traffic lights have been eliminated over the past seven years. The result? Safer and more efficient driving.
Follow up:
Per the article:
"[The traffic-light-less system] works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk. We only want traffic lights where they are useful and I haven't found anywhere where they are useful yet."
Mr Monderman, 61, compared his philosophy of motoring to an ice rink. "Skaters work out things for themselves and it works wonderfully well. I am not an anarchist, but I don't like rules which are ineffective and street furniture tells people how to behave."
In short, if motorists are made more wary about how they drive, they behave more carefully, he said.
The main junction in Drachten handles about 22,000 cars a day. Where once there were traffic lights, there is a roundabout, an extended cycle path and pedestrian area.
In the days of traffic lights, progress across the junction was slow as cars stopped and started. Now tailbacks are almost unheard of — and almost nobody toots a horn.
Monderman is using a basic understanding of human action to determine policy. Even more fascinating for a policy-maker is that Monderman's determination for traffic regulation is simply to leave it alone. And wouldn't you know it? It works!
Whether or not anarchy is the answer for all traffic situations is debateable. My intuition is that many problems with traffic arise from poorly dispersed information; therefore, it's possible that certain regulatory systems could work to compensate for this lack of information and thereby create a more efficient system. If this justification for regulation sounds familiar, it's because it's one of the oldest excuses for government intervention in the book. I am reminded that information asymmetries often serve a useful, naturally regulating purpose, and government "solutions" to whatever free-market "problems" often, if not always, result in even bigger problems. The positive feedback loop of enacting regulation makes for quite a slippery slope.
Traffic both frustrates and fascinates me as it is an everyday, interactive negotiation between regulation and anarchy. I look forward to seeing additional results from experiments in traffic anarchy. I would also like to see such experiments attempted on larger scales.
The lingering question is, "Could anarchy be policy?" Well, why not? When the varying fixes and patches inevitably fail, the settings can always be reset to default. What is the default but anarchy?
For a few previous posts on traffic, check out the following: