“Shared Spaces” in Oxford and Beyond: A Model for the Internet?
5 Comments Published by Malte June 18th, 2007 in *OIINEWS, Better Regulation, Regulatory Choice, Road Traffic, RoundaboutsBrowsing through the Oxford Times the other day, I came across an interesting development in our very own town that touches upon my recent post about regulation by honking. Apparently, Oxford is considering introducing so-called “shared spaces” to deal with traffic congestion:
Oxford University and Oxford City Council both signalled their support this week for the controversial approach to gridlocked roads, which involves getting rid of traffic lights and allowing vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians to mix together, sharing road space.
Widely used in Holland and Denmark, shared space is said to produce safer, smooth-flowing, low-speed traffic movement.
With roads no longer segregated, the whole approach depends on motorists, cyclists and pedestrians having to behave courteously towards each other.
This seems to be exactly the kind of policy Yorick mentioned in his comment. At any rate, I like the notion of a “shared space.” It sounds good and intuitively seems to fit a lot of situations, in which people engage in risky behavior and almost magically coordinate their actions to avoid some harm.
From a regulatory perspective, it would be interesting to know under what conditions such shared spaces work. Thinking briefly about it, at least two aspects come to mind:
- Participants must have a strong self-interest in behaving considerately. In the case of road traffic, for instance, any accident is likely to adversely affect the other person as much as oneself. And even if an armored car hits a pedestrian without being damaged itself, there will normally be (legal) safeguards that allow the community to identify the wrongdoer by her license plate. Economists, I guess, would call this internalizing the negative externalities of one’s behavior.
- The space must be designed in a way that allows people to communicate effectively and base their decisions on that communication. This seems to be the difference between a crowded injunction and a deserted highway. For instance, it will be very hard for a pedestrian to keep eye contact with a driver, who flies by with 170 km/h.
These are just two ideas, and there are probably some more conditions that must hold before a space is truly “shared.” Knowing what they are would give us a better idea of (a) in which situations we’d rather NOT regulate by imposing and enforcing rules and (b) how the law may help create the conditions, under which shared spaces work.
Couldn’t this be a model for some spaces on the Internet, where people engage in risky behavior and would coordinate their actions better if we managed to make the spaces shared ones?
5 Responses to ““Shared Spaces” in Oxford and Beyond: A Model for the Internet?”
- 1 Pingback on Jul 10th, 2007 at 4:02 am
Leave a Reply
Search
About
This blog is currently discontinued. Thanks for all your comments and attention. You can now find me here.
Malte,
this is indeed an interesting idea. However, isn’t the problem of congestion due to the immense amount of cars that use the infrastructure?
I see that there might be some benefits to replace traffic lights in cities so that there is no idle waiting of cars (so here would be also an environmental benefit), but watching out of the window to the junction at the Ashmolean (http://webcam.oii.ox.ac.uk/), it seems like people do that already. What I don’t understand however, is how the proposed system could deal with too many cars on the street. Are there any statistics that could show that there is congestion although there is actually enough space on streets, hence this space is not used properly?
Tobias, as far as congestion is concerned, I am not aware of any statistics (though I didn’t really search myself). At any rate, I would assume that it is possible to explain the efficiency gains of “shared spaces” over “traffic lights” in a simple stock-and-flow model.
A brief sketch (I’m a lawyer, so please bear with me): Let’s say we have an injunction with one stream of cars wanting to cross from the north to the south and another one from the east to the west. Only one car can cross the injunction in a given unit of time. Your variables would be something like a1 as the number of cars approaching from the north, a2 as the number of cars leaving to the south, b1 as the number of cars approaching from the east, and b2 as the number of cars leaving to the west. You would also need a binary for the injunction. For example, if x = 1, a car on the north-south can pass. If x=0 a car from the east-west route can pass. Add one more variable for the backlog on each side, put it all in an Excel sheet with the respective formulas, and run a little simulation, using some of the brand new random numbers you recently blogged about. Compare two cases: a “shared space” case, in which x alternates between 1 and 0 from round to round. And a “traffic light” model, in which x stays 1 for some rounds and then changes to 0 for some rounds, regardless of the number of incoming cars from each direction. I would expect that backlog on both sides is minimized in the “shared space” case. But perhaps this is the point where an economist and Excel freak should take over? ; )
However, I do not think that it is just congestion. Safety is probably even more important. In the case of shared spaces, people have to read and trust the signals of their fellow citizens. If one driver makes a mistake, there is a good chance that another oner will notice and prevent an accident. In the case of traffic lights regulation, however, people mainly seem to trust their own traffic light, i.e. the abstract rule (green = go, red = stop), rather than the other driver. So if the other driver happens to ignore her red lights for some reason, an accident seems to be much more likely. Or maybe I miss something?
Hi Malte,
I think point 2 is much more important than point 1. Traffic rules and tort liability don’t seem to limit road accidents to a socially acceptable level. That’s why separate lanes, sidewalks etc. have been introduced in the past. As you point out, I think communication and direct interaction among the participants are key to road safety.
What’s interesting in this respect is that sociologists say that cars have become more and more “anti-interaktive”, with shaded and small windows becoming more and more popular. So the car industry should not be forgotten to be involved in efforts to make traffic more communicative.
Cheers from Switzerland,
Daniel
Looking through SHARED SPACE in the Internet, I just came across your comments. To my mind, the virtue of Shared Space lies in removing the misconceptions inherent in the present traffic control system. The present system runs counter to legal, engineering and safety principles.
1. Priority rules are incompatible with the road users common law responsibilities.
2. Drivers entering an intersection have priority over those who are trying to leave.
3. Major roads and traffic lights promote high speeds across intersections.
No traffic control can single-handedly cope with all possible traffic conditions, nor prevent congestion when volumes exceed capacity.
If you are interested, I can send you a couple of articles dealing with the flaws of today’s traffic management.
Ken
kennethAtodd@aol.com
29/9/07