Mo Rocca on The Future of Traffic

This post and the previous are from the journal project for the Community-Based Planning Seminar most of my Studio colleagues are also taking. I am sharing them here because a blog is no good if it is not updated regularly and I thought my classmates might be interested. I just watched a piece by Mo Rocca on CBS News Sunday Morning about the Future of Traffic. The piece isn't online yet, but here is a link to Mo Rocca's "Tomorrow Show" where it will be posted eventually.

Mo Rocca rides around in cars and talks to an old guy (I didn't catch who he was) about paying attention while driving. The old guy says that road signs are actually distracting. Reading a sign that warns of children playing might cause you not to notice the actual children playing. Drivers rely too much on signs, he says, to the degree that they feel they don’t need to be alert to other visual cues and they pay less attention to what is happening in the street. This leads to Mo Rocca’s introduction of the “Naked Streets” campaign that is taking hold in Europe. He travels to Holland and records a piece about a four-way intersection where the stoplight was removed and a roundabout installed with no signs. The mayor of the city explains that the problem with traffic lights is that they make everybody feel safe, but one driver running a red light can cause a deadly accident. The roundabout forces drivers to use visual cues from their surroundings and to communicate with each other. There are even bike lanes (designated by alternate paving surface and color) that wind through the roundabout. Mo Rocca rides his bike through the intersection on the bike lane and a car yields to him and he calls out “thank you!” in Dutch. The mayor says that when the intersection had a stoplight there were four accidents a year (or was it four fatalaties? I don’t recall). Since the removal of lights and the installation of the roundabout there have been none.

Could Americans, who are notorious for texting, shaving, eating breakfast and surfing the web while driving, ever be able to design and use such a system? Mo Rocca then goes back to the states to report on the development of cars that drive themselves using remote sensing technology. One of the designers of one of the cars says that this kind of automation is working well for the airline industry and is the future of driving in America. It was pretty scary. Exactly the wrong solution to the problem, instead of trying to get people more engaged with the street, with what is going on around them, these designers want to turn to technology to allow people to become even further removed from their physical surroundings. So that they can concentrate on what? I wonder.