Now this is interesting! No road signs experiment.

[2011G6E]

This is very interesting...won't ever happen here, but it's nice to see some places actually put a bit more thought into road safety than "Slap up a speed camera and that wil fix it"...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...0/uk.transport

Why no road rules rule

A Dutch experiment to scrap traffic lights has led to empty roads and fewer crashes . Could it solve Britain's gridlock?

Britain's choked city streets might be a lot safer and free-flowing if all the traffic lights, bus lanes and white lines were removed, according to new research.
In a complete switch from received wisdom on congestion and road crashes, transport experts in the Netherlands have found that leaving drivers, pedestrians and cyclists to their own devices can be ideal.

Far from generating anarchy, road rage and a trail of death and destruction, taking away traffic controls prevents drivers 'bunching' into gridlock and speeding because it forces them to slow down and take more care.

Experiments in towns in the northern Friesland region found that busy junctions where two or three people had been knocked down and killed every year dropped to a zero death rate when they took the traffic lights away and put a tree in the middle of the street instead. UK experts now believe the same methods could work in Britain.

The unusual traffic arrangements are based on forcing motorists to rely heavily on eye contact with each other, pedestrians, cyclists and bus drivers instead of falling back on road signs and red lights to dictate their driving. When drivers have to keep an eye out for potential obstacles and casualties because there are no lines, traffic lights or lane markings they automatically slow down to below 20mph - a speed where a child who is knocked down is five times more likely to live as one who is hit at more than 30mph.

Now the Government is 'cautiously' analysing results from Holland and other Continental countries where the method has been pioneered to see if it can be copied in Britain.

They removed most traffic lights, all road markings, and all road signs, and found that the place actually became a lot safer, and that people generally slowed to common sense speeds in city streets instead of becoming speed crazed lunatics. Of course one reason is that instead of watching for signs, you actually have to use your brain and take into account all the other vehicles around you...a novel idea to a lot of motorists from what I can see in traffic...

There was also a study that said increasing the "yellow" at traffic lights by just one second made intersections a lot safer, as it gave people a slightly longer time to asses what was going on in heavy traffic, even though you might think one second wasn't much. However, a lot of places rely on fines from red light cameras so much that they actually decrease the yellow timing so you are more likely to be caught out...nice.