Pushing Risks to the Bottom

What if not having traffic signals made roads safer, less congested, and more efficient overall? If one searched for videos of Hanoi, one will see an endless stream of mopeds streaming through streets in an unending flow. A sight that made me think of cohesive symphony. The first level thinking denotes a poor country with a primitive traffic system. But I think much of our Western traffic system could learn from the flowing system that pushes risks down to the individual drivers. 

People naturally think adding more things to a problem is the way to fix it. But adding fat is rarely the answer. Reducing fat is better for human health and so is the case for most systems, let alone traffic. The error is in believing more signals and signs will lead to greater safety as Hans Monderman, a traffic planner, points out. 

Monderman pulled out traffic signs and signals in a Dutch town called Drachten and replaced them with roundabouts. The result was an unending flow where drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians paid attention to each other and miraculously figured out how to give right of way to each other with eye glances. It was the ambiguity and chaos that led to cooperation between all road users. 

As Monderman put it, the possibility of danger itself made people pay attention. It shifted the risk away from the government trying to protect one group over others to all responsibility pushed down to drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. They were each responsible for themselves and each other because of the ambiguity. They couldn’t blame each other for not following rules. It’s one example where shifting the risk down to the lowest individual level can incentivize people to act rationally and cooperate with others. 

Denmark’s Christianfield followed suit and took out traffic signals from its major intersections and saw fatal accidents reduce to zero. Wiltshire in the UK adopted something similar and saw traffic accidents decline by 35%. Poynton, a village in the UK, went further to design a ’shared spaces’ environment as well. 

This doesn’t seem too different from how some companies eliminate various corporate policies/rules and tell employees to make their own judgments. Reminds me of Netflix.