This Wired article about a road designer who thinks that reducing signage and restrictions makes a road safer has been around for some time. Many libertarians have written about it (see Ashish Hanwadikar for example) because they see it as proof of their belief that less rules are better.
But there is something strange about the article. Something is missing. Can you tell me what?
I’m taking a really wild guess here, but is the article lacking statistics that say the traditional way of traffic management is bad, compared to the monderman way?
As in, does it lack a comparitive analysis of trafic accidents of the two systems?
I read the original article. I am not going to comment using libertarian terminology of “fallacy of the argument” but I am going to say that all the people who talk about neo-traditional urban design, more human interaction in cities, redundancy of traffic engineering, new urbanism, smart growth, etc. are concerned about the deteriorating social fabric of the US urban areas largely due to hugely subsidized suburban housing and the federal highway program. They are correct as far as the US situation is concerned. However, US situation is the other extreme of what we have in India. Indian already has this organic traffic situation advocated in the article where you share the road with cows and camels in addition to other cars and two wheelers. Shops are already on the roads and the interaction ism already intense. We don’t need the situations propagated by the authors. Instead, what we need is the middle road.
I can tell you what’s wrong with the article. It forgot to mention how today’s traffic regulations endanger and obstruct traffic. For that you have to go to “Traffic Control – An Exercise in Self-Defeat” http://www.bikewalk.org/trafficcontrol_backtobasics.doc
or http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n3/v27n3-brieflynoted.pdf
Jay