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Traffic calming and Ted Dewan
Jul 30, 2007
Back at euroGel last fall I was lucky to have Ted Dewan, from the Roadwitch project in Oxford, England, give one of the best Gel talks I've ever heard. (Here's a video clip of Ted's presentation.)
Ted uses art, activism, and community events to slow down the dangerous high-speed car traffic in his residential area. He's helping to create a good experience for everyone in the area - a closer, more cohesive community with safer streets.
And now New York City is catching the bug. In the West Village, progressive urban planners will try a new traffic-calming scheme at two dangerous intersections. From the New York Times yesterday, Where Street, Sidewalk and Sanity Intersect:
Those plans, rooted as much in philosophy as in design, draw inspiration from an item with the unlikely name of woonerfs (Dutch for "living streets"). Woonerfs are traffic systems in the Netherlands that seek to sand away the sharp boundary between driver and pedestrian, and create space that makes streets more welcoming for walkers.
... To achieve this sense of equality, roadbeds would be raised so that drivers entering the area would meet an incline — a rise of six inches over a distance of a foot — and feel a jolt if they hit the incline at any real speed. This seemingly modest adjustment, together with the feeling of driving over cobblestones, would send drivers the instant and unmistakable message that they had entered a different realm. As Mr. Schwartz put it, it would signal that they were “intruders” and would do well to slow down.
“What happens is the car goes in and it has no choice,” Shirley Secunda, the chairwoman of Community Board 2’s Transportation Committee, said of such configurations. “It has to go two or three, or at the fastest, five miles an hour, because it has to maneuver around the different kinds of furniture and landscaping to get through. So it becomes a shared street.”
Emphasis above is mine. The phrase caught my eye because Ted Dewan first got press by placing an actual living room set - rug, furniture, coffee table, TV - in the middle of his street. That certainly slowed down traffic.
Once again, here's a video clip of Ted Dewan's euroGel presentation.
See also: Salon.com piece from May 2004 about traffic calming ("A new school of traffic design says we should get rid of stop signs and red lights and let cars, bikes and people mingle together. ") Registration may be required.
