Red Light Red Light

Long-time readers know one of my pet peeves are red-light cameras. However, some Belgians take things a step farther:

Most traffic lights should be torn up as they make roads less safe, one of Europe's leading road engineers said yesterday.

Hans Monderman, a traffic planner involved in a Brussels-backed project known as Shared Space, said that taking lights away helped motorists, cyclists and pedestrians to co-exist more happily and safely.

Residents of the northern Dutch town of Drachten have already been used as guinea-pigs in an experiment which has seen nearly all the traffic lights stripped from their streets.

Only three of the 15 sets in the town of 50,000 remain and they will be gone within a couple of years.

The project is the brainchild of Mr Monderman, and the town has seen some remarkable results. There used to be a road death every three years but there have been none since the traffic light removal started seven years ago.

There have been a few small collisions, but these are almost to be encouraged, Mr Monderman explained. "We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt," he said yesterday.

"It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.

"We only want traffic lights where they are useful and I haven't found anywhere where they are useful yet."

The Belgian example seems to work because Drachten has about 50,000 residents and, like a lot of European locales, a lot of people ride their bikes. But I think this lends credence to the point a lof of Americans have made; red-light cameras do not make the roads safer. They certainly cannot make roads safer if the red-lights themselves.

I'm not certain if we can advoacte the removal of red-lights in the United States. Certainly, traffic in these parts already has its share of dangerous drivers who do not understand the rules of the road. Plus, if you remove lights, what do you replace them with? Stop signs? Roundabouts, which seem to already be popping up like kudzu across the state?

The red-lights will stay; its the red-light cameras that have to go...