Scare-cars
Tom Vanderbilt's recent book "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do" highlights some of the paradoxes involved in trying to "calm" traffic. Solutions involving signs and engineering often backfire, for example: In the case of speed bumps, annoyed drivers will speed up between the humps to make up lost time. Engineers combat this by packing the bumps tightly, but speeders often just switch over to a nearby alternate route. And the more stop signs in a small town, the more people blow through them.
One positive finding from traffic research is that the more "human" a driving environment appears to be -- the more that drivers are made aware that there are other people out there depending on the drivers' attentiveness (and the less people behind the wheel think that stop lights, speed limits, and lane markings will do their work for them, automatically) -- the more sensibly people drive.
Residents of a small English town, Lockeridge, appear to have figured this out on their own. Tired of drivers using their roads as shortcuts between major arteries -- while keeping up arterial speeds -- they put "scare-cars" in key locations: mannequins placed on the side of the roads to catch the attention of drivers. One looks like a father and daughter, in matching blue sweatshirts, playfully running near a school -- just possibly into the street! A figure in an orange safety vest, with binoculars, could be a maintenance worker, a cop monitoring drivers, or just a hyper-cautious bird-watcher. In any case, you're likely to touch the brakes. Then there's Sponge-Bob, who pops up from behind two rocks as if to say hello.
The scare-cars are designed to snap speeders out of their cocooned haze -- their sat-nav complacency -- and observers say it works. Best of all, there's no need to wait for someone to get run over before more official measures are put into place, which is the usual pattern.
Via How We Drive and Cognitive Edge. Photographs by Dave Snowden, of Cognitive Edge, reproduced under the terms of a Creative Commons license.).
