Driving home this evening I happened to be listening to P.M. on R4. They broadcast an item on cycling in Paris. Apparently the Parisian authorites have decided that cyclists don't need to obey traffic lights. Particularly when turning right against the red. Some sexy sounding French lady explained that this was OK, in fact she felt safer, since all you had to do was take care and be vigilant. They then aired the views of a taxi driver who sounded off on how unsafe this was.
Then came the killer argument. The BBC reporter got on his bike to navigate the Arc de Triomphe interchange where he said something on the lines of , "...despite the 'chaos' the traffic takes care and thanks to the give way from the right rule it all works well. In fact the TRAFFIC LIGHT CONTROLLED JUNCTION ON THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE AT THE OTHER END OF THE CHAMPS ELYSEES HAS FIVE TIMES THE ACCIDENT RATE OF THE UNCONTROLLED ARC DE TRIOMPHE JUNCTION".
Really, it's so bloody obvious isn't it. Needless to say Eddy bloody Maier didn't get it.
Listen lads, Turn Off The Damn' Traffic Lights.
But it gets worse for the dirigiste French does it not? This factoid is a proxy for the success of freedom and markets and is another nail in the coffin of bureaucratic central planning; traffic lights being bureaucratic road rationing by remote control
(PS. In a previous life I was a highway design Engineer - letters after my name and everything).
Tuesday, 11 August 2015
So that's it then?
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13 comments:
A courier cyclist explained this to me recently, you are safer diving across the wrong side of the road against red, then tucking back into your lane.
It sounded a bit dangerous to me but he wins road races and stuff, so he's the expert.
Then there is the case of traffic lights on roundabouts.
These often encourage drivers to come onto the roundabout and block entrances and exists because the driver is not using there own judgement. The light goes green , onto the roundabout they go, the exit is blicked, and there they are they are stuck.
And you might have a four lane entrance roundabouts with one light for all lanes
For a successful example of light switched off for two years there is the Sainsburies roundabout at lakeside shopping center. It used to be a tailback, now its clear all day.
Turning right against a red (in France) or turning left against a red in the UK is perfectly sensible. That’s allowed at a traffic light controlled cross roads a mile from where I live. I think it’s also allowed at all cross roads in the US. That requires no more judgement by the “turner” than doing the same thing at a junction (T junction or cross roads) which is not controlled by lights.
As to turning off ALL traffic lights, that’s much more debatable. There are junctions where without lights, it’s virtually impossible to cross a road because of the sheer volume of traffic on the latter. In that case it makes sense to make would be “crossers” queue, and then stop all traffic on the road to be crossed, and let those queuers all cross together in one fell swoop.
Well that the logic of traffic management of the main road but is it actually true that no one lets the side road traffic out. Also a mini roundabout may be appropriate, if must. Maybe LoLa can comment.
RM. 'Virtually impossible to cross the road'. Do not actually impossible then? Also, whatever happened to Zebra Crossings and Belisha Beacons? These worked very well indeed without an actual traffic light. They are solutions that work with the grain of the market.
Din, thanks for real life example re Lake Side, funny how everybody has a couple of examples of that but I've never had a commenter saying "When my local traffic lights went down it was chaos".
Whatever the theory behind it, observation says that traffic lights are worse than useless.
RM, YPP policy is to simply declare all roads (apart from motorways and A-roads) to be one giant Zebra crossing, so drivers always have to give way to pedestrians. So you lose a couple of seconds while somebody crosses, so what, you can soon make it up again so no time lost.
MW. I that's the rule in Swiss towns.
That's the rule in Canada too for the most part. And to be fair it does work well in most cases but it does lead to careless pedestrians who just step off the pavement without looking because they are legally in the right. As if that will somehow stop them being dead when they get hit. So drivers have to be pretty cautious.
L, I had noticed that, I thought car drivers in CH were just very polite.
D, good, so as ever, we don't need to dream up new rules and try them out.Whatever I or anybody else can think up has nearly always already been tried somewhere, so we know straight away whether it will work.
The "careless pedestrian" is then a new problem. So how about a rule that says "Once a pedestrian has been waiting for three seconds, he has right of way"?
@D and @MW
The 'careless pedestrian' is the same as the 'f**king cyclist' in the mind of most drivers - In reality, just like the PWIM, they don't really exist in the wild. Its because drivers believe they own the road ('cos I pay road tax') and have a god given right to speed and drive like total f**kwits and everybody else needs to get out of the way.
And strict liability would probably help... as in Holland and Denmark (among others).
D. MW. In the days of Zebra Crossings my granny used to do just that. She'd walk along the pavement, preferably in the same direction as the traffic, and when she got to the ZC just turn abruptly and put one foot in the gutter...cyclists and drivers all regularly had heart failure. It was wonderful, if frightening, to watch. BTW she lived to be 103...
"In reality, just like the PWIM, they don't really exist in the wild."
I once walked out onto the second half of a zebra crossing without looking and was surprised to see an MGB appear beside me standing on its nose. It was morning and I hadn't really woken up...
"RM, YPP policy is to simply declare all roads (apart from motorways and A-roads) to be one giant Zebra crossing, so drivers always have to give way to pedestrians."
My driving instructor pointed out to me that this is always the case. "Do you really want the hassle of running someone down and possibly killing them? No, you don't, so they have, effectively, a de facto right of way" was how he put it.
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