3-Way Street from ronconcocacola on Vimeo.
Cyclists, peds, and auto traffic alike are all observed disobeying traffic laws and participating in careless and unlawful behavior.
From Ron's site:
The video is not an attempt to say NYC streets are the most dangerous in the world. They are not. It is an attempt to clearly illustrate very specific behaviors — that if adjusted — would make a huge difference in our streets and our quality of life.The video is part of a larger campaign including street posters, a website, and this video in an effort to educate people with regard to these behaviors. Learn more about it here.
At least one blogger suggests that better design is required to eliminate the opportunity for such reckless behavior, stating:
I don't see the behaviour at this junction as being about "bad habits". What I see is simply a very badly designed junction which almost invites people to behave in the way that they do.At 1.9 million Vimeo views in under two weeks, the campaign video has gone viral and then some. While the ROI on such a campaign is ultimately subjective, if any one of these viewers were inspired to reconsider their behavior on the streets, I'd call it a success.
Dutch road junctions don't look like and work like this - they are different for a reason: it removes the conflicts and improves safety. A long-standing theme of Dutch road design is the concept of Sustainable Safety. The concept is to remove conflict so that collisions are rare and the consequences of those which remain are relatively small. Roads are made self-explanatory so that bad behaviour is reduced and the way people behave is changed. Less "enforcement" is needed when people have no reason to want to do dangerous things. This has resulted in the safest roads in the world.
The Peter Gunn Theme is a nice touch, too.
@ohaijoe
The main problem is that the traffic laws were created to speed motor traffic at the expense of the other modes.
ReplyDeleteNotice that there were no traffic lights before cars came on the scene, and bikes and pedestrians (and slower vehicles) could coexist without too much trouble.
Now we've decided that the most space-inefficient mode should have exclusive passage in one direction at every intersection, forcing the formerly free-moving modes to stop. Pedestrians and cyclists know instinctively that the signals are slowing them down, and are left to fight with each other over the margins.
Probably the only way to fix this is to slow the cars down to human speed and remove the traffic lights. Or design those future robot-driven cars to properly co-exist with other street users.