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Call to abolish traffic lights

Hmm....I've seen times where traffic lights being out of action have turned normally congested junctions into free flowing ones, but I've also seen the reverse.

I don't agree with traffic lights on roundabouts, kinda takes away the point of a roundabout.
 
There's a busy junction in Hull where the traffic lights went through a phase of breaking down frequently. From what I saw, everyone does go more slowly, but right of way tends to give way to 'might is right.' Pedestrians barely get a look-in, whilst lorries and to a lesser extent buses do pretty much what they like. I did see a couple of hair-raising near misses as well.

I can see the logic behind the idea, but I'm not convinced it would work. I'm especially unconvinced that pedestrians would benefit much by it, particularly on busy, arterial roads where it's very hard to cross without a zebra crossing.
 
I can see it working with low traffic volumes but in the rush hour around Cardiff it would be absolute chaos!

I wonder if they couldn't just switch them all off at certain time of the day?
 
spacemonkey said:
I can see it working with low traffic volumes but in the rush hour around Cardiff it would be absolute chaos!
Click to expand...

[tries to imagine what the junction of Richmond Road/Albany Road/City Road/Crwys Road would be like with no lights - head explodes! :D]
 
I think taking away trafic lights would be a bad idea.


i have been to mumbai...

right of way goes to whoever has biggest waggon and isnt afraid to use it
 
Pingu said:
I think taking away trafic lights would be a bad idea.


i have been to mumbai...

right of way goes to whoever has biggest waggon and isnt afraid to use it
Click to expand...

try Nepal - the only rule is if someone is going faster than you, they honk the horn and you must get out of the way...

...oh and if a cow sits down in the road you must wait for it to move, you are not allowed to touch it or shout at it to move....!
 
It is worth adding that (assuming this is the same thing that was discussed on Newsnight) .. not only were traffic lights removed, but also every other signal or sign that indicated any right of way for anyone ...

Hence the area in between the buildings in what was a probably medium flow traffic area was simply paved from building to building.

There were no pavements, no signs, no lights, no pelican crossings. there was in fact only the smooth paving across which people cars bycicles and the like all had to negotiate their way around each other safely.

It was permitted to walk or drive anywhere in the space, indeed the people demonstrated this by standing in the middle of the road while they filmed their segment. What happenned while this was going on? simple the cars drove around them, slowly.
 
5 years ago there were no traffic lights here and then one lot went up and then another ...:eek: it was like a virus :eek: and now there are even traffic lights at roundabouts :eek:
 
After that big storm in whatever year it was in the 80s, I was driving across Vauxhall Cross and there were no traffic lights. Was fucking terrifying
 
spacemonkey said:
I can see it working with low traffic volumes but in the rush hour around Cardiff it would be absolute chaos!
Click to expand...

Yes. Traffic volume is probably key to whether it works or not.

It's interesting that, although the Netherlands has similar levels of car ownership to the UK, traffic volumes are lower, congestion less of a problem and schemes like this can work (anyone got any links, btw?). I can't imagine them doing so in drive-everywhere, congested Britain.
 
Thanks for putting me onto this, really good discussion point.

This is a good video to watch a busy junction without traffic lights in action in India, not necessarily a model to base anything on, but proof it does work.



I notice Ben Hamillton-Bailie is one of the interviewees in the newsnight programme, he's done a very short and simple introduction to the concept of shared space which can be found here.
http://www.hamilton-baillie.co.uk/pa...ed space.pdf

I'd like to point out my main motivation for being car free is motorists ridiculous attitude that they have special privileges for use of public space in towns and cities. The 'I'm bigger and faster than you, get out of my way' attitude, that even on this discussion forum seems to prevail for motorists.

At present the majority of our public space in cities is road space, which is fine, as long as pedestrians have absolute priority on all but the major arterials, basically the whole road network should be treated as a zebra crossing. Motorised traffic must slow down or stop for Cyclists, who in turn must slow down, or stop for pedestrians. Basically pedestrians and cyclists must have legal priority over motorists.

Bus lanes should of course be considered as different beasts, and given priority unless they go through pedestrian priority zones.

One point to note which Ben HB mentions in his article, is that no matter the road design, paving etc, if pedestrians are perceived as rare then cars speed up and come to dominate the space.

With kids being forced to stay indoors due to parked cars and road danger, pollution, noise and congestion growing problems, we need to take back our cities for people, and maybe pilot schemes removing all distinctions between pavements and roads and planting trees, with outdoor cafes placed in the middle of the road might be the beginning.

We need to stop worrying about traffic flows and start building places where you want to stop and enjoy being.

And hell, about time we shook those 'stop at red' cyclists awake to the real world, slow down, check for space and carry on guys. Maybe one day we can allow motorists this privilege too, but not yet, they need to be driving 50cc engined electric cars restricted to 10mph in cities first. I don't think people can be trusted with anything more powerful.
 
roryer said:
Thanks for putting me onto this, really good discussion point.

This is a good video to watch a busy junction without traffic lights in action in India, not necessarily a model to base anything on, but proof it does work.

Click to expand...


I'm not convinced we can learn a great deal from that: India's road safety record is abysmal!
 
Aye

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2004/04/07/stories/2004040700010900.htm

India has one of the highest per capita accidents in the world — roughly 86,000 people get killed and more than four lakh get injured or crippled every year.

According to the International Road Traffic Federation, India stands fourth in the number of accidents after the US, Japan and Germany.

But it tops the world in road fatalities — its fatality rate is 1.97 per 1,000 vehicles compared to Germany's 0.20.

With just 1 per cent of the global vehicle population (and a road network of just 3.3 million km), India has 6 per cent of the total accidents of the world.
Click to expand...

By comparison, the UK has the lowest rate of road deaths in the EU after Sweden.

e2a: I've seen that video posted on motoring forums as an example of absolutely scary road behaviour (at normal speed).
 
I was browsing that CFIT report the other day. There's some really interesting stuff in there.

I'm tempted to liken the situation in India now to that of Britain in the 1930s. Car use historically has been confined to the wealthy, but as it becomes cheaper it spreads to a wider segment of the population. Meanwhile, the transport infrastructure of the country is built around the railways, and the roads are ill-regulated, not coping well with increasing traffic volumes, and dangerous. Comparatively crude cars don't help the situation.

In Britain, the number of fatalities on the roads was well over 4,000 in the late 1930s, over a third higher than today despite the fact that in 1939 there were only around three million vehicles on the roads. After a peak during the war (mainly because of the blackout), they fell and then rose again, principally because of rising traffic volumes, before better-regulated roads and safer cars brought the figures steadily downwards from the 1970s, despite ever-rising traffic volumes.

Inevitably, as traffic rises in India, the roads are going to become more dangerous. Let's hope that some of the same safety measures that have brought down the number of casualties here are adopted over there. Let's also hope that the Indians don't make the same epic mistake that we did in the 1950s and 1960s and decide that with road traffic taking an ever greater share of journeys, the railways can be allowed to decline. Only now, with rising oil prices and growqing congestion, are we coming to see how short-sighted that was.
 
Roadkill said:
There's a busy junction in Hull where the traffic lights went through a phase of breaking down frequently. From what I saw, everyone does go more slowly, but right of way tends to give way to 'might is right.' Pedestrians barely get a look-in, whilst lorries and to a lesser extent buses do pretty much what they like. I did see a couple of hair-raising near misses as well.

I can see the logic behind the idea, but I'm not convinced it would work. I'm especially unconvinced that pedestrians would benefit much by it, particularly on busy, arterial roads where it's very hard to cross without a zebra crossing.
Click to expand...
^^^^^^^^^^^^
This is absolutely true
spacemonkey said:
I can see it working with low traffic volumes but in the rush hour around Cardiff it would be absolute chaos!

I wonder if they couldn't just switch them all off at certain time of the day?
Click to expand...
^^^^^^^^^^
I think turning off traffic lights off-peak and in select areas would be the way to go, for a start.



One other thing, hinted at in the Swedish example is that some kind of additional road structuring could be implemented to make it safer - maybe cobblestones, to slow down traffic, or some kind of other design that could incorporate pedestrians (I haven't thought this through, as you can tell, but there must be something out there...)

A last point - I think for a more civilised, anarchist world to ever come to fruition we do need much smaller populations and less spatial centralisation in general. Scandinavian examples prove this time and time again.

I'm not anti-cities, but I am anti-modern cities, which are a sprawling mess for the most part. Design/planning can solve so many day-to-day problems.
 
I've become really conscious how quite pretty areas of London have very recently been turned into industrial nightmares by 'road development' and, in particular, traffic lights. Clapham South and Clapham Common are good cases in point.

This was all part of 'traffic calming' measures of 5-10 years ago when Councils started getting huge monies from parking fines which were ring-fenced for road development. So roads which did not need development were developed anyway, just because there was money in the kitty. And then we started having veritable forests of traffic lights and other 'road furniture' and road markings. And not just copses of traffic lights at major junctions but traffic lights at almost every junction.

Fifty years ago, late at nights, we had the technology to allow traffic lights to be triggered by oncoming traffic, so lights would change as cars approached if there were no cars coming the other direction. Now we seem to have lost that technology and so even if you are travelling at 4 in the morning on deserted roads, you can still have to stop every twenty-five yards for pointless traffic lights, with all the attendant extra pollution caused by having to slow down, stop and then restart when the light changed.

Roundabouts are organic, in that they slow traffic naturally and allow flows to happen without the 'dead time' you get when traffic lights change from one direction to another. Roundabouts are not unsafe.

Zebra crossings used to have a belisha beacon to warn people to give way. Now they all have traffic lights to stop cars whether or not anyone is on the crossing.

I would love to see a complete review of all 'road furniture' and all unneccessary signs removed and I would love to see a complete freeze on any new traffic lights. I want to live in a city where I'm not always being bossed by one sign or another or funnelled and channelled by roadside fencing.

Here is a quote: "Overall, road deaths in 2005 UK were just 11% lower than the 1994-1998 average. Research from Oxford University suggests little headway is being made, pointing to hospital admission figures for road traffic accidents that have remained relatively unchanged over the last decade."

I think we are paying a huge cost in terms of quality of life and quality of air in city centres in order to reduce road casualties a very small amount.
 
ska invita said:
I think turning off traffic lights off-peak and in select areas would be the way to go, for a start.
Click to expand...

They do this a lot at night in France. They're set to flashing amber from 11pm onwards.
 
They don't....
Urban Planners in the 1960's, were of the oponion that car & pedestrian traffic had to be totally segregated....
As a result, most 1960's traffic delevopment schemes, were predicated on this idea....
Examples of this, would be the Barbican elevated walkway system that almost reached Liverpool Street, & which is now being delmolished, the Leytonstone High Road Footbridge near the Green Man Roundabout, & perhaps the most extreme form of this, Caulderdale "new town" in Scotland....
 
zygote said:
They do this a lot at night in France. They're set to flashing amber from 11pm onwards.
Click to expand...
And Rome, from about 8pm to some fairly late time in the morning. Scared the crap out of me!
 
I passed my test (in 2005) without ever having driven through a set of traffic lights, because there aren't any in my town. We have a couple of mini-roundabouts but beyond that everybody just has to use common sense. It works ok except for the main square - not so much a problem for cars but it's very difficult as a slow-moving pedestrian (e.g. OAP or mum with small kids) to get across as there's never any big gaps in traffic.
 
As a cyclist I would never get escape from the end of this road every morning. There are two converging streams of traffic controlled by lights and as it is, usually several cars come through on red.

traffic.jpg
 
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