Dennis Githinji Mwaniki
Who in Kenya hasn’t faced the mayhem
of being caught up in the cities road madness? My guess is everyone reading
this piece has. I know of myriad problems one can associate with Kenyan
traffic, so I’ll talk discriminatively of what you haven’t considered as a
solution to solve one problem in particular- safety. I mean everything from
over speeding, overtaking, competition for space, and independent
decisions-making.
You probably don’t know who Hans Monderman is, or more to the point,
was; he died of prostate cancer in January 7th 2008 aged 62. He was
a Dutch civil engineer, a specialist in road traffic designing.
In his time as a Dutch road traffic
engineer and innovator he managed to place his name in more than a few people’s
mouths for radically challenging the criteria by which solutions for streets
designs are evaluated. His work compelled transportation planners and highway
engineers to look afresh at the way people and technology relate to each other.
He is particularly known for his “Shared
Space” design approach, also known as designing for negotiation or
shared streets. Monderman found that the efficiency an safety of urban streets
improved when the streets and surrounding public space was redesigned to
encourage each person to negotiate their movement directly with others. Shared
space designs typically call for removing regulatory traffic control features,
and replacing intersections with roundabouts.
Anyone who has being in Kenya long enough can relate that to; imagining Nairobi without kerbs, lane
markings, signs and lights and traffic police. I like the sound of that but
just figure it out in your head and let me know any way it work.
At the centre of Monderman’s
philosophy about traffic was a desire to force drivers to take responsibility for
their actions, to make us drive as if we walking down the streets, not driving.
To achieve this, go ahead and remove all the traditional road signs and
markings and replacing them with none at all.
Doing this creates a ‘shared space’ in
which everyone- old ladies with walking sticks, Ferrari drivers, schoolchildren
, hairdressers- is on an equal footing. Lets be clear on that first:- if you
are with me still you’ll figure that this means no one has the legal or
physical right of way, everyone ends up behaving more responsibly- driving more
slowly, looking at other people rather than just other cars, sharing the space
available in a civilized manner.
Surprised? Wait, there is more! I know
what you thinking, “ that was so nuts of him, it’s impossible,” and all that; I’ll tell you this wasn’t
merely an idea. Monderman’s first experiment in shared space traffic took place
more than 20 years ago in a village in Holland, where the residents had become
fed up with it being used as a daily thoroughfare for 6000 speeding cars.
Within a fortnight of the signs and markings being removed, speeds had dropped
by more than half.
Since then, this method of traffic
calming has become increasingly popular and is genuinely beginning to make a
difference. You’ll be surprised that more than seven countries in Europe have
already signed up at government level to undertake in the endeavor-shared space
road design. On initial inspection this intersections are always in anarchic
mess but within weeks the speeds reduce drastically and the number of accidents
always end up vanishing from these scenes.
A few places with this kind of design
implemented are:-
v In Denmark, the town of
Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and signals from its major
intersection and cut the number of serious or fatal accidents a year from three
to zero.
v In England, towns in Suffolk and Wiltshire
have removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort to slow traffic -
experts call it "psychological traffic calming."
v A dozen other towns in the UK are looking to
do the same. A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the
Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that
drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35
percent decrease in the number of accidents.
This man literally disliked traffic signs, yes. He
could put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve
warning on a major highway, but Monderman considered most signs to be not only
annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they were an admission of failure, a
sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job.
"The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a
road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind,
it's much better to remove things."
A picture of Hans Monderman.
I write this with Kenya in mind
because of the lifes we are loosing on our roads these days. Now, can our
Kenyan drivers heed to the call of responsibility required in this method of
traffic calming? Would they by any chance watch the other and scrap the
unending tread of, “me first” on our
roads? Will a Kenyan driver wait and watch the pedestrian on the road as an
equal user?
My answer is yes; I look at it as a
method that gives every humane driver a no choice kind of a situation and thus
the resulting smooth, slow and safe traffic. No one will watch the lifeless
signs and lights to decide what to do on the road; rather you will be forced to
watch closely on each other for a safe drive. A motorist will look upon a
motor-cyclist and a cyclist, and a cyclist will look upon the pedestrian and in
the end everyone looks on the safety of the other.
By anyone’s analysis of the same, we
are able to predict a safe traffic with very few accidents. On a scale of 1-10,
I give it a seven, so 70% pass.
It’s plainly simple, my remaining
three points go to the following inevitable:-
1. Machine failure
2. The hard-core arrogant drivers on our roads.
3. The rude Kenyan pedestrians trying to test the
patience of motorists.
My verdict is, it can work let’s try
it out on our Kenyan roads or what…..!?
