It's always a joy when one sees the powerful forces of County Hall swing into action. Soon, a quiet, peaceful, minor road into a town turns fluorescent as the men in nylon trousers and clipboards begin their strutting. "Hush...", the whisper goes around, "We're getting
calming."
Calling the nasty little tank traps, conflict zones and ugly road furniture that proliferates around village entrances "calming" is a little like calling King Herod "not very fond of children". I have yet to see anyone - resident or road user - calmed by the fruits of the Men With Clipboards. That's because it doesn't work. Artificially creating conflict between road users is not really very conducive to road safety. And if it's bad for cars, it's lethal for riders.
Take the situation above... The Council has installed a set of chicanes on an almost blind bend. This is not good news for drivers who are crashing here with regularity. Strangely, there were no crashes here before, the village had no record of speed related crashes and there had been, er, 12 injury accidents in the previous five years, none of them on the road that was now calmed. Such is local authority logic. For motorcyclists, this calming is very dangerous indeed. That's because, as the opposing traffic rounds the corner into the chicane, they see a motorcyclist traversing it and believe they have room to squeeze through. Add in those steel posts and the raised edge and you have a very effective piece of rider-killing calming.
The other great Council favourite is the speed "cushion". Again, resembling a cushion in the same way that the Ghengis Khan's Mongol hordes resembled a knitting circle, these trank traps could have been deliberately designed to unseat riders.
Imagine - you're riding to work in the rain. Because of this, the road is shiny and you can't see the faded, scraped paint on the speed hump ahead. You don't know it's there, and you hit it as you turn out to pass a parked car. You're straight off - the angled front of the hump twisting your front wheel away from you. Imagine too that, as usual, the car behind has not been "calmed" by the presence of obstructions in the road but enraged. So he's following too close. Nasty.
Low sun, dark, bit of salt from the road on your visor - any of these can mean a rider misses a spiteful "cushion" and comes off. And these are deliberately created hazards. How the hell do they make a road safer?
If local authorities want to make the streets safer and more conducive there are far better ways to do it. Bumps, humps and chicanes are neanderthal traffic management. Shared Space schemes are infinitely more effective. That's because shared spaces schemes don't introduce a potentially lethal (although wonderfully state-sanctioned) hazard into the road, they introduces something FAR more powerful. Ambiguity.
The concept of “shared space” is now well-established everywhere in Europe. The German town town of Bohmte turned a village shopping street that had become a traffic corridor back into a community space again. It stopped the Dutch area of Haren becoming a sink for speeding cars and trucks, and recreated the village centre. Just drop a few of those place names into Google (along with a search for Hans Monderman and Ben Hamilton Baillie) and you’ll quickly see what it’s all about.
Shared space means no more balkanisation of villages with tank traps, paint and rows of roadsigns. Instead it means fewer signs, no white paint – and it gives roads back to the communities that live in them. At the same time, it means no more artificially-introduced conflicts and hazards.
So is it all pie in the sky? Bit of a dream? The New York Herald Tribune said; “Monderman made his first nervous foray into shared space in a small village whose residents were upset at its being used as a daily thoroughfare for 6,000 speeding cars. When he took away the signs, lights and sidewalks, people drove more carefully. Within two weeks, speeds on the road had dropped by more than half.”
Wouldn’t it be great to reclaim our streets and see that sort of result here? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see village centres turned into a real village squares again? Wouldn't it be great if riders could ride without nervously watching for every supposed "road safety" device the Council had strewn in their way like caltraps?
Shared space - safety over spite.
