In today's Telegraph www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/3462203/Traffic-light...l
The Thunderer has a bit more on it.
Here's the gist (bits stolen from both articles):
Pedestrians crossing a section of the ring road in Ashford, Kent are encouraged to step out in front of cars as all road users ? whether on foot, on a bike or in a car ? share equal priority. Pedestrians can cross the road wherever and whenever they choose, without waiting for a gap in the traffic.
People wishing to cross the road should first make eye contact with approaching drivers. This has led to criticism from blind charities, who claim that blind people will be unable to negotiate a crossing.
The speed limit has been reduced to 20mph but there is no plan to enforce it and there are no road humps or chicanes to compel drivers to slow down. Instead, the designers claim will obey the limit because the road width has been reduced to leave vehicles only just enough room to squeeze past each other. Kerbs have also been lowered and the distinction between road and pavement deliberately blurred. The theory is that lights lull people into a false sense of security, meaning that they pay less attention on a green light and fail to notice someone stepping off the pavement.
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follws on from an experiment in london on shared space, where there was a significant reduction in incidents after it was tested
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follws on from an experiment in london on shared space where there was a significant reduction in incidents after it was tested
Sounds good, but a fall in accidents could indicate either road-users sharing the space more safely, or vulnerable road-users being displaced. I dunno which applies in the case of that London experiment, but it's a mistake to only measure accidents without examining usage.
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I lived in Ashford for 20 years, and yes the ring road was a stinker. However when i go back to visit my olds I just cant understand why they have wasted soooooo much money on this "share space carp." Project went thousands over budget and has INCREASED congestion doubled the amount of traffic lights. Complete joke.
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Pedestrians crossing a section of the ring road in Ashford Kent are encouraged to step out in front of cars as all road users ? whether on foot on a bike or in a car ? share equal priority. Pedestrians can cross the road wherever and whenever they choose without waiting for a gap in the traffic.
Interesting idea, claimed to have worked elsewhere. It's worth trying, but it'll be interesting to see how it works out in practice, because the problem with a notion of "equal priority" is that it's a legal notion, whereas the physical reality is that a big metal box can enforce priority over a person on foot. Hopefully that won't be what happens in practice, but the danger with a plan like this is that by removing the pedestrian-only zone it may give pedestrians nowhere to hide from an unruly driver (though the article seems to imply that the pavements have not been completely removed). A 20mph limit seems a little high for a shared use zone, and if it is indeed unenforced then it has the potential to increase the risk to pedestrians.
I hope it works, but a busy ring road seems a strange place to try this, and it'll need to be carefully monitored. It's also a pity that this scheme don't seem to include any effort to cater for the needs of blind people; for them, is there really any alternative to a system of pedestrian crossing lights with a buzzer?
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Drachten in Holland has tried something even more extreme.
tinyurl.com/6osszb
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Fascinating - the un-nanny state. It'll never catch on here.
Anybody remember unmarked crossroads? The bane of the Huddersfield driving test.
Unlikely as it seems, there were no traffic lights at all in Heckmondwike in those days - some of my secondary school cohort with traffic-light-phobia took their tests there for that reason.
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I think that it will keep the emergency services and courts busy.
Given that the local authority has stated publicly that pedestrians (and cyclists) have equal priority with motorists, if I want to cross from one side of the shared space to the other, then all I have to do is walk across, without bothering to wait for a gap, and the cars, buses, taxis, trucks, etc will just have to stop. So effectively the whole ring road becomes a zebra crossing. That's not going to cause road rage is it.
And any motorist who hits a pedestrian for any reason because they have not respected their equal priority, is not only going to be charged with careless/dangerous driving, but is likely to be the subject of a big civil claim as well.
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And even the politician in charge of implementing the scheme doesn't think it will work -
www.kentonline.co.uk/kol08/article/default.asp?art...6
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>>People wishing to cross the road should first make eye contact with approaching drivers.<<
Looks to me like a long lost Monty Python script, i haven't laughed so much for ages. I can just imagine the sketch .. "Mr Permenantly Disabled, a poker player from Splat in Gotchashire claimed from his hospital bed that he had right of way because he had made eye contact..." !
>>The speed limit has been reduced to 20mph but there is no plan to enforce it and there are no road humps or chicanes to compel drivers to slow down. Instead, the designers claim will obey the limit because the road width has been reduced to leave vehicles only just enough room to squeeze past each other.<<
All vehicles are the same width then .. ? Citroen C1, ... Fire Engine, ... do we need a degree course in common sense ?
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