Before

After

Traffic at the Fountain Place intersection in Poynton, England would perennially back up for blocks. By taking out the traffic lights and replacing the intersection with a pair of "rotaries" (roundabouts), traffic now steadily and cautiously flows through town, which has been described as corpuscles moving through veins.

Whether you want to cite Michel Deronzier, Hans Monderman, Ben Hamilton-Baillie or Tim Pharoah to define shared space, or shared streets urban design, it is essentially street layout design with no traffic lights or signs, no pedestrian demarcations, no road markings and no curbs!

Chaos and confusion? Pedestrians run over? Car accidents? No, apparently not.

The center of Poynton, England is a case in point. The city solved its backed up, snarling traffic problems and take-your-life-in-your-hands pedestrian crossings at Fountain Place with roundels (two connected roundabouts) and shared space design.

It may sound counter intuitive, but with no lights or stop signs, drivers have uncertainty about who has the right-of-way and are more cautious, even behaving like they're truly sharing the road with other drivers. With traffic lights, drivers race away when it turns green, and speed up when it turns yellow, or even race through red lights. In the middle of a town with pedestrian traffic, that kind of driving is just too fast and dangerous.

Drivers slow down when confronted with roundabouts. They may briefly pause before entering, but once in vehicles flow through in a continuous manner. Pedestrians can even find gaps in the slow moving traffic to cross, making eye contact with drivers and maybe holding up a hand to say "Thanks for letting me slip through." With the reduced speed of traffic, Poynton was able to bulb out the sidewalks, taking room away from the roadways to give pedestrian shorter crossings.

The shared space design approach is winning accolades, but has gotten opposition from groups representing the interests of the blind and partially sighted people.

For more on shared space, visit Ben Hamilton-Baillie's "What is Shared Space".