ANARCHY IN THE STREETS

One of my favourite areas of research recently is stories which suggest that the more “safety” measures we are forced to use the less safe we actually are. Like the recent study which showed that wearing a bike helmet increases your chance of being hit by a car because drivers give you less room if you are “protected” by a helmet. There is an entire field of study called “risk compensation” which claims (basically) that the more safe you feel, the more risk you’ll take and the more time you’ll end up spending in the hospital. Well, engineers in the Dutch town of Drachten have taken this idea to its logical extreme by removing almost all of the traffic lights from 12 of the 15 intersections in the town of 50,000. According to the mastermind of this idea, traffic planner Hans Monderman, the experiment rests on the belief that if driving is perceived to be more dangerous, then drivers will naturally be more careful and cause less accidents. Sounds nutty, but so far the town has had amazing success, with not a single fatality in the seven years since the traffic lights were replaced with roundabouts and only a few small accidents. As Monderman explains, “We want small accidents in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt... It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want.“ (The Telegraph)