Challenging assumptions, Ben Hamilton-Baillie
Challenging assumptions
Ben Hamilton-Baillie advocates replacing street clutter with social protocol
Allan B Jacobs has been described as ‘the ultimate student of the street’ by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS). The author of Great Streets and The Boulevard Book was asked by PPS to summarize the key conclusions from his long career as both a researcher and practicing urban designer. His response was two-fold. Firstly, he concludes that improving streetscapes and urban design requires utilizing the power of observation and questioning assumptions. Secondly, he advocates fostering interaction between pedestrians and cars in the public realm.
As he writes ‘Most modern street planning is based on traffic assumptions, rather than real research and observation of existing places. Planners and designers (should) study what does and does not work in existing streets, and use these observations to better design great public streets – to copy the good examples.
Contrary to traditional planning assumptions, the segregation of cars and pedestrians decreases safety and community vitality. From (my) research and observation, ….intersections and streets that allow every type of movement and interaction between pedestrians and drivers work best, serving as attractive, welcoming, and exciting places that help build the local community. When cars are more fully aware of, and integrated into, the pedestrian realm, both pedestrians and drivers are safer.’
The wise old professor is not, of course, alone in reaching such conclusions. From William Whyte to Jan Gehl, careful, systematic and open-minded observations of actual human behaviour in public space has played an important part in developing urban design principles. And the shift from the segregation of vehicles from public space towards an integrated approach reflects a broad sea-change towards shared space. It is a change that offers the opportunity for radical new approaches to the design of streets and public spaces to be explored and tested, providing the potential for systematic and comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of many long-standing assumptions.
Shift in thinking
The background research carried out by Phil Jones and others in the drafting of the Manual for Streets highlighted the lack of evidence to support many long-standing assumptions that provided the bedrock for traffic engineering principles and guidance such as Design Bulletin 32. Modern traffic engineering stems from an era that believed in the potential and right of the state to resolve potential social conflict, clarify rights, and provide certainty and order. In the unpredictable and constantly shifting chaos of multiple human behaviour and interaction, the certainty of stopping distances, sight-lines and standard dimensions provided, at the very least, some reassurance of order. The lack of evidence to support many cherished standards for modern street design demonstrates the tendency for assumptions to become established truths wherever the state seeks order out of apparent chaos and uncertainty.
The shift in thinking represented by the Manual for Streets is one landmark in the changing landscape. The work of John Adams and others to explore the counter-intuitive complexities underpinning risk compensation is also beginning to overturn many widely held assumptions about the nature of safety and the importance of risk in the public realm. Hazards are helpful; they help to strengthen our connection to our environment and to adapt our behaviour accordingly. Risk is an essential component of successful public spaces, and accidents are the inevitable corollary of risk. Indeed, the vast majority of accidents are ‘good events’, helping to provide the experiential feedback to make judgements for our safety. The implied aim in the title of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents raises some interesting contradictions. As Adams points out, ‘risk management is not rocket science; it’s much more complicated!’
Conventional traffic engineering has exerted a significant limitation on the boundaries of the public realm. Urban design has, for much of the past fifty years or more, been limited to the occasional traffic-free precincts or the peripheries of the streetscape. Beyond the edge of the kerb, public space has remained the preserve of highway engineering, with its own rules and standards set by assumptions about the safe and efficient movement of vehicles. In the USA, around 80 per cent of the urban space between buildings is defined or controlled by traffic engineering, with highway components dominating the immediate foreground of the built environment to an extent that pushes architecture and urban design to an insignificant side role. Traffic signals, lamp-columns, road markings, signs, kerbs, crossings, bollards and barriers define our everyday streetscapes – we simply take them for granted as an inconvenient and ugly necessity of modern life.
Case studies
But what if they are not necessary? Suppose we discovered that the assumptions behind the installation of all this expensive highway kit were just that – assumptions? Unless we have the opportunity to observe and test the alternative, we will never know. Poundbury, Kensington High Street, Seven Dials, Blackett Street in Newcastle and New Road in Brighton represent rare challenges to conventional highway design. In mainland Europe, an ever increasing range of projects that deliberately eschew all traces of standard highway engineering provide challenging case studies for the counter-intuitive benefits of integrating traffic into human dimension of the public realm. The examples extend beyond Northern Holland; there are notable examples of shared space working well for busy streets and intersections in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
The UK needs more case studies to build a strong evidential basis for understanding the potential to exploit simple social protocols and civility as an alternative to regulation, barriers and controls in reconciling the needs of people, places and traffic. There are many impressive urban schemes in the pipeline or under construction. The Breaking Boundaries project to remodel the one-way inner ring-road surrounding Ashford in Kent will soon provide an example on a large scale for a typical town centre. The redevelopment of King’s Cross, the remodelling of the West End Quarter of Oxford, the proposed Bristol University precinct and the regeneration of Ancoats and New Islington in Manchester will, before long, extend our vocabulary of possible shared spaces in busy city centres. But it will be many years before we build the confidence to address the poverty of public spaces across the swathe of ordinary, undistinguished suburbs, secondary centres, typical High Streets, railway forecourts, residential intersections and everyday spaces that form the backdrop to most of our day-to-day lives.
Proposals
So, given the urgent need for case studies and observation, and the widespread doubts about most of the assumptions underpinning conventional street design, here are some proposals to help advance knowledge and understanding. Most of them involve NOT installing expensive, high-maintenance components and will therefore benefit the budgets of highway authorities. To begin with:
Do not install any further traffic signals on any but the busiest highways. They cost a fortune to install and maintain, and there is no evidence that they contribute anything to safety, congestion or urban quality. On the contrary, there is an increasing number of case studies that suggest the opposite. Until such evidence exists, all the poles, lights, ugly control boxes, anti-skid surfacing and road markings can be removed whenever opportunities arise.
Never use anti-skid surfacing in towns – it only encourages speeding.
End the practice of pouring red, yellow and white paint all over the public realm. Centre lines are only necessary where a highway authority is trying to encourage vehicles to move faster. In most instances they are trying to reduce design speeds to less than 20mph. Yellow lines along kerbs are unnecessary – alternative parking regimes are available and are more effective.
Remove formal pedestrian crossings. They merely contribute to the conditions that, in turn, give them an apparent purpose. By introducing a false sense of safety to the pedestrian, they increase danger. Courtesy crossings are cheaper, simpler, and more appropriate. A wide-ranging review of pedestrian crossing types by the University of Lund suggests that informal crossings are significantly safer than puffins, pelicans, toucans, zebras and all the rest of the complicated and expensive zoological armoury.
One-way streets should be discouraged, and should always be open to two-way bicycle traffic in towns. Two-way bicycle movement in one-way streets provides an element of uncertainty and confusion, thus lowering speeds and enhancing safety.
Pedestrian guard-rails should be removed from streets and intersections and remodelled into temporary prison cages for any local authority officer found guilty of vandalising public space.
Keep-left signs on any roundabouts or median strips should be removed and offered as trays and table-tops for pavement cafés. Enough drivers have now learned that we drive on the left, and generally circulate around intersections in a clockwise direction. Seven Dials in Covent Garden demonstrates the redundancy of such signs (no reported accidents in 17 years), and the positive effect their absence has on the use of space.
Lights on traffic signs can be abolished. Advances in car headlight quality, and developments in reflective paint, renders such a profligate use of energy unnecessary. The inconvenient issue of climate change should cause, at the very least, to reduce energy waste. If any highway authority is nervous about risk or liability, refer them to the case of Corringe v. Calderdale. It is the duty of drivers to take the road as they find it…
The list could be extended almost indefinitely. But until we have opportunities to test the assumptions of NOT relying on standard signs, markings, signals and barriers in the public realm, there is little to justify their use. The change in approach may dent the profit margins of the suppliers of such equipment, but the importance of the public realm to the economic and social vitality of communities is too important for decisions on street design to be driven by narrow commercial interests.
Poundbury, Kensington High Street and Blackett Street were greeted with considerable scepticism at their inception by those who assumed that conventional safety measures of sight-lines, road markings, signals and guardrails were essential. But subsequent observations suggest that such doubts were ill-founded. Perhaps it is time to re-write the rules for street design and return to allow social protocols to replace regulation and control, accept that humans are intelligent, observant and adaptable creatures, and promote street designs that foster simple civility.
Ben Hamilton-Baillie is an urban designer and movement consultant, specialising in the research and development of new approaches to street design, road safety and traffic engineering.
Project for Public Spaces (PPS). www.pps.org/info/placemakingtools/placemakers/ajacobs
CABE Space (2005). What are we scared of? The value of risk in the public realm.
Adams, J. (1995) Risk. Routledge, London
Adams, J. Risk Management, It’s not Rocket Science: It’s more complicated. Social Affairs Unit. Available from http://john-adams.co.uk/papers-reports/
Hamilton-Baillie, B. Shared Space – Reconciling people, places and traffic. Built Environment Jan 2008 (to be published)
Ekman, L. (1988). Pedestrian risk at Formal Crossings compared to other crossing points. Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden. Bulletin 76
Top left Kensington High Street. Picture: RBKC Barriers, signage and markings removed.
Top middle Seven Dials, Covent Garden. Picture: Ben Hamilton-Baillie
Top right Blackett Street, Newcastle
Bottom left Ashford Ring Road: Elwick square proposal
Bottom middle Clutter. Image: English Heritage: Save our Streets campaign
Bottom right Skvallertorget (Gossip Square), Norrkoping, Sweden. Traffic signals and conventional highway engineering removed, Photo: Tyrens, Sweden
Ben Hamilton-Baillie advocates replacing street clutter with social protocol
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Midnight in a nice square ... A wicked | The police appear | Outraged citizens express their horror ... |
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| The municipality responds with promptness and efficiency to repair the damage ... | ... and get on with ... | ... the business of responsible government. |
Allan B Jacobs has been described as ‘the ultimate student of the street’ by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS). The author of Great Streets and The Boulevard Book was asked by PPS to summarize the key conclusions from his long career as both a researcher and practicing urban designer. His response was two-fold. Firstly, he concludes that improving streetscapes and urban design requires utilizing the power of observation and questioning assumptions. Secondly, he advocates fostering interaction between pedestrians and cars in the public realm.
As he writes ‘Most modern street planning is based on traffic assumptions, rather than real research and observation of existing places. Planners and designers (should) study what does and does not work in existing streets, and use these observations to better design great public streets – to copy the good examples.
Contrary to traditional planning assumptions, the segregation of cars and pedestrians decreases safety and community vitality. From (my) research and observation, ….intersections and streets that allow every type of movement and interaction between pedestrians and drivers work best, serving as attractive, welcoming, and exciting places that help build the local community. When cars are more fully aware of, and integrated into, the pedestrian realm, both pedestrians and drivers are safer.’
The wise old professor is not, of course, alone in reaching such conclusions. From William Whyte to Jan Gehl, careful, systematic and open-minded observations of actual human behaviour in public space has played an important part in developing urban design principles. And the shift from the segregation of vehicles from public space towards an integrated approach reflects a broad sea-change towards shared space. It is a change that offers the opportunity for radical new approaches to the design of streets and public spaces to be explored and tested, providing the potential for systematic and comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of many long-standing assumptions.
Shift in thinking
The background research carried out by Phil Jones and others in the drafting of the Manual for Streets highlighted the lack of evidence to support many long-standing assumptions that provided the bedrock for traffic engineering principles and guidance such as Design Bulletin 32. Modern traffic engineering stems from an era that believed in the potential and right of the state to resolve potential social conflict, clarify rights, and provide certainty and order. In the unpredictable and constantly shifting chaos of multiple human behaviour and interaction, the certainty of stopping distances, sight-lines and standard dimensions provided, at the very least, some reassurance of order. The lack of evidence to support many cherished standards for modern street design demonstrates the tendency for assumptions to become established truths wherever the state seeks order out of apparent chaos and uncertainty.
The shift in thinking represented by the Manual for Streets is one landmark in the changing landscape. The work of John Adams and others to explore the counter-intuitive complexities underpinning risk compensation is also beginning to overturn many widely held assumptions about the nature of safety and the importance of risk in the public realm. Hazards are helpful; they help to strengthen our connection to our environment and to adapt our behaviour accordingly. Risk is an essential component of successful public spaces, and accidents are the inevitable corollary of risk. Indeed, the vast majority of accidents are ‘good events’, helping to provide the experiential feedback to make judgements for our safety. The implied aim in the title of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents raises some interesting contradictions. As Adams points out, ‘risk management is not rocket science; it’s much more complicated!’
Conventional traffic engineering has exerted a significant limitation on the boundaries of the public realm. Urban design has, for much of the past fifty years or more, been limited to the occasional traffic-free precincts or the peripheries of the streetscape. Beyond the edge of the kerb, public space has remained the preserve of highway engineering, with its own rules and standards set by assumptions about the safe and efficient movement of vehicles. In the USA, around 80 per cent of the urban space between buildings is defined or controlled by traffic engineering, with highway components dominating the immediate foreground of the built environment to an extent that pushes architecture and urban design to an insignificant side role. Traffic signals, lamp-columns, road markings, signs, kerbs, crossings, bollards and barriers define our everyday streetscapes – we simply take them for granted as an inconvenient and ugly necessity of modern life.
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
Case studies
But what if they are not necessary? Suppose we discovered that the assumptions behind the installation of all this expensive highway kit were just that – assumptions? Unless we have the opportunity to observe and test the alternative, we will never know. Poundbury, Kensington High Street, Seven Dials, Blackett Street in Newcastle and New Road in Brighton represent rare challenges to conventional highway design. In mainland Europe, an ever increasing range of projects that deliberately eschew all traces of standard highway engineering provide challenging case studies for the counter-intuitive benefits of integrating traffic into human dimension of the public realm. The examples extend beyond Northern Holland; there are notable examples of shared space working well for busy streets and intersections in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
The UK needs more case studies to build a strong evidential basis for understanding the potential to exploit simple social protocols and civility as an alternative to regulation, barriers and controls in reconciling the needs of people, places and traffic. There are many impressive urban schemes in the pipeline or under construction. The Breaking Boundaries project to remodel the one-way inner ring-road surrounding Ashford in Kent will soon provide an example on a large scale for a typical town centre. The redevelopment of King’s Cross, the remodelling of the West End Quarter of Oxford, the proposed Bristol University precinct and the regeneration of Ancoats and New Islington in Manchester will, before long, extend our vocabulary of possible shared spaces in busy city centres. But it will be many years before we build the confidence to address the poverty of public spaces across the swathe of ordinary, undistinguished suburbs, secondary centres, typical High Streets, railway forecourts, residential intersections and everyday spaces that form the backdrop to most of our day-to-day lives.
Proposals
So, given the urgent need for case studies and observation, and the widespread doubts about most of the assumptions underpinning conventional street design, here are some proposals to help advance knowledge and understanding. Most of them involve NOT installing expensive, high-maintenance components and will therefore benefit the budgets of highway authorities. To begin with:
Do not install any further traffic signals on any but the busiest highways. They cost a fortune to install and maintain, and there is no evidence that they contribute anything to safety, congestion or urban quality. On the contrary, there is an increasing number of case studies that suggest the opposite. Until such evidence exists, all the poles, lights, ugly control boxes, anti-skid surfacing and road markings can be removed whenever opportunities arise.
Never use anti-skid surfacing in towns – it only encourages speeding.
End the practice of pouring red, yellow and white paint all over the public realm. Centre lines are only necessary where a highway authority is trying to encourage vehicles to move faster. In most instances they are trying to reduce design speeds to less than 20mph. Yellow lines along kerbs are unnecessary – alternative parking regimes are available and are more effective.
Remove formal pedestrian crossings. They merely contribute to the conditions that, in turn, give them an apparent purpose. By introducing a false sense of safety to the pedestrian, they increase danger. Courtesy crossings are cheaper, simpler, and more appropriate. A wide-ranging review of pedestrian crossing types by the University of Lund suggests that informal crossings are significantly safer than puffins, pelicans, toucans, zebras and all the rest of the complicated and expensive zoological armoury.
One-way streets should be discouraged, and should always be open to two-way bicycle traffic in towns. Two-way bicycle movement in one-way streets provides an element of uncertainty and confusion, thus lowering speeds and enhancing safety.
Pedestrian guard-rails should be removed from streets and intersections and remodelled into temporary prison cages for any local authority officer found guilty of vandalising public space.
Keep-left signs on any roundabouts or median strips should be removed and offered as trays and table-tops for pavement cafés. Enough drivers have now learned that we drive on the left, and generally circulate around intersections in a clockwise direction. Seven Dials in Covent Garden demonstrates the redundancy of such signs (no reported accidents in 17 years), and the positive effect their absence has on the use of space.
Lights on traffic signs can be abolished. Advances in car headlight quality, and developments in reflective paint, renders such a profligate use of energy unnecessary. The inconvenient issue of climate change should cause, at the very least, to reduce energy waste. If any highway authority is nervous about risk or liability, refer them to the case of Corringe v. Calderdale. It is the duty of drivers to take the road as they find it…
The list could be extended almost indefinitely. But until we have opportunities to test the assumptions of NOT relying on standard signs, markings, signals and barriers in the public realm, there is little to justify their use. The change in approach may dent the profit margins of the suppliers of such equipment, but the importance of the public realm to the economic and social vitality of communities is too important for decisions on street design to be driven by narrow commercial interests.
Poundbury, Kensington High Street and Blackett Street were greeted with considerable scepticism at their inception by those who assumed that conventional safety measures of sight-lines, road markings, signals and guardrails were essential. But subsequent observations suggest that such doubts were ill-founded. Perhaps it is time to re-write the rules for street design and return to allow social protocols to replace regulation and control, accept that humans are intelligent, observant and adaptable creatures, and promote street designs that foster simple civility.
Ben Hamilton-Baillie is an urban designer and movement consultant, specialising in the research and development of new approaches to street design, road safety and traffic engineering.
Project for Public Spaces (PPS). www.pps.org/info/placemakingtools/placemakers/ajacobs
CABE Space (2005). What are we scared of? The value of risk in the public realm.
Adams, J. (1995) Risk. Routledge, London
Adams, J. Risk Management, It’s not Rocket Science: It’s more complicated. Social Affairs Unit. Available from http://john-adams.co.uk/papers-reports/
Hamilton-Baillie, B. Shared Space – Reconciling people, places and traffic. Built Environment Jan 2008 (to be published)
Ekman, L. (1988). Pedestrian risk at Formal Crossings compared to other crossing points. Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden. Bulletin 76
Top left Kensington High Street. Picture: RBKC Barriers, signage and markings removed.
Top middle Seven Dials, Covent Garden. Picture: Ben Hamilton-Baillie
Top right Blackett Street, Newcastle
Bottom left Ashford Ring Road: Elwick square proposal
Bottom middle Clutter. Image: English Heritage: Save our Streets campaign
Bottom right Skvallertorget (Gossip Square), Norrkoping, Sweden. Traffic signals and conventional highway engineering removed, Photo: Tyrens, Sweden
