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: The Buck Stops Here

Traffic

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

An interesting excerpt from an essay by Tom Vanderbilt, who has a new book: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). In the mid-1980s, Monderman, then a regional safety inspector for Friesland, was dispatched to the small village of Oudehaske to check the speed of car traffic through the town?s center (two children had been fatally struck). Previously, Monderman, like any good Dutch traffic engineer, would have deployed, if not an actual traffic light, the tools of what is known as ?traffic calming?: speed bumps, warning signs, bollards, or any number of highly visible ­interventions.But those solutions were falling out of favor with his superiors, because they were either ineffective or too expensive. At a loss, Monderman suggested to the villagers, who as it happens had hired a consultant to help improve the town?s aesthetics, that Oudehaske simply be made to seem more ?villagelike...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on August 05, 2008 (boomark / email).