Imagine crossing the street walking backwards with your eyes shut. To your surprise, considerate drivers graciously give way as you hurtle, rear first, to what you take to be your death. Such compassion was unexpected: this is Taft after all, and you, my friend, are mere road kill. Or so you thought.
Now imagine walking free from fear of crashing into a rampaging bus ever again, on roads that cut traffic, promote social interaction, prevent accidents, encourage cycling… all this, with not a stoplight, sidewalk, or sign in sight.
Enter Shared Space, the brainchild of late Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. In his quest to pave an asphalt way for the future of humanity, he advocated a return to the days before modern street engineering. By doing away with the trappings of the conventional highway, he sought to break free from the status quo of the streets – defined by‘60s-style segregation, incessant signs, road blocks, cement borders, and other rigid demarcations (i.e. painted white stripes) that drive a wedge between those on foot and those on wheels.
The idea may seem, at first glance, counter-intuitive, and indeed Monderman was an object of ridicule for the three decades since he first voiced the need to rid the roads of what he called “highway clutter”. He stressed that by relying too heavily on plastic signs, painted stripes and lights that flash red, green and yellow, we are “losing our capacity for socially responsible behaviour …The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”
His solution was radically simple: get rid of signs so people can think for themselves.
Streets serve twin functions, the need for movement and the need for space. The first turns them into little more than flat surfaces for transportation – a bit of asphalt for cars to skid across. Shared space moves beyond this and reconciles the tensions between the two, because a boring strip of road is also a channel for social interaction, a shopping district-cum-tiangge, an on-street café, a protest area, a public forum.
As a briefing for the UK’s Department for Transport put it, “well designed streets can offer opportunities for recreation, social interaction and physical activity. Poorly designed streets can be indifferent or unwelcoming, contributing to community severance, reducing social cohesion as well as suppressing levels of walking and cycling. They can also have a negative impact on local economic performance.”
“Shared space is a design approach that seeks to change the way streets operate by reducing the dominance of motor vehicles, primarily through lower speeds and encouraging drivers to behave more accommodatingly towards pedestrians.”
In other words, designing roads for fewer cars and nicer drivers. So how does it work?
Shared Space places walkers, cyclists, vehicles, and other motorists on equal terms, similar to the woonerfs of the Netherlands. But to give free-thinking individuals the chance for real road awareness, it achieves this by eliminating signs – those insults to human intelligence –- altogether. On most streets, rough cut sidewalks and kerbs are flattened in favour of a level surface. Comfort spaces, zones kept completely free from passing vehicles, are put in place for the vision-impaired or disabled who used to rely on them. A potpourri of signs and markers give way to subtle coloured pavements that define where the road begins… and begins.
Cross-shaped intersections turn into wide, circular roads that provide drivers with a more holistic view of coming traffic, improving vision and safety. For aesthetic appeal, these work well along historical landmarks or heritage sites, or on town squares where roads meet.
The concept is built on the principles of sustainable design: diversity (it can’t work everywhere), adaptability (where it doesn’t work, try) and democracy (trust people, like, seriously). It resists a one-size-fits-all approach, and so every new road of this kind is different, each adapting to local needs.
As one might imagine, such open terrain would lead to anarchy, making roads impossible to navigate and a virtual dead zone for pedestrians.
Actually, researchers found, it improves traffic flow and reduces congestion as sign-free streets force drivers to sharpen their senses, with traffic speeds along redesigned roads dropping from 21 to 16 km/h (13 to 10 mph) in Norrköping, Sweden and other cities across Europe. For well over a year, major car accidents were zilch, apart from a few close brushes involving cyclists.
Why? ‘Modern’ streets are split into two strongly defined areas that leave drivers, with a false sense of superiority, in their motorised bubbles over poor pedestrians sticking to the sidewalks for fear of their lives. Forced sharing imbues Driver and Pedestrian with renewed sensitivity, causing both to naturally slow down, each giving way for the other. Without signs to guide them, people shift their eyes away from the road to the people on the road – all the more reason to relax, enjoy a bit of scenery or buy items from a passing hawker.
Which is too bad if you’re in a rush, because the magic of Shared Space is precisely that: an exercise in patience and tolerance, in making eye contact, in slowing down, in respecting those around us again.
Outdoing snobs in their SUVs, even jeepney drivers know road courtesy. Really less of an engineering stint than an entirely new way of thinking, Shared Space pins its faith on human intelligence and common sense, grounded in the understanding that to dismiss drivers as buffoons or sadistic maniacs – who, if left to their own devices with no systems of control, are bound to hit a passing granny on a cane to get ahead come rush hour – is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like children whose parents must eventually wean themselves off constant reminders to brush their teeth, at some point in our lives, we do step aside when a bus comes hurtling right at us at 400 miles an hour.
So says architect and urban planner Ben Hamilton-Baillie, “the idea of transferring responsibility, actions, control, and authority from the State down to communities and individuals – to treat people with respect and to treat people as if they were individuals with their own intelligence – lies at the heart of Shared Space and is very different from the standardized controlled role of…most modern traffic engineering.”
More importantly though less directly, Shared Space serves to restore relationships of trust and community between people pressed to make eye contact and left free to interact. In other words: road, driver and pedestrian become one.
This might all sound well and good for polite Swedes, but in a country that boasts of daily road accidents, ruthless drivers and clueless pedestrians who converge in a chaotic flurry of near-constant traffic on suicidal highways rammed shut by regular rush hour jams reaching eight-hours each? Only in ‘da Philippines!
Then again, maybe the reason why signs and speed limits never seem to work here is that in lands as ‘underdeveloped’ as our own, we share space by default. From roadside ukay-ukay’s to market stalls jostling for space on a public plaza, to a 5×5 metre slum dwelling shared by a family of seven, sharing space is the norm; something obvious to any commuter who has ever indulged in the luxury of cramming into an LRT, sardine style.
Shared Space, if not as a matter of conscious design, is an age old reality often driven by necessity in tight-knit communities that blur the lines between public (shared) and personal space, and where concerns over individual privacy are not as strong. This is most obvious in the countryside, and in the traditional streetscapes of Europe and old Tokyo. But even amid the seething chaos of downtown Delhi or Manila, there is order.
Today, shared spaces ride on a wave of support from the European Union, and have found their way into towns and cities across Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Britain, New Zealand, and increasingly, the United States.
Indeed, sharing – of any sort – makes perfect sense in a world of seven billion people and rising.
