The removal of road markings is to be celebrated. We are safer without them

> Research has shown that removing white lines induces uncertainty and thus cuts vehicle speeds by 13%.

Not paving roads would decrease vehicle speeds, too. Adding obstructions to windshields would also likely increase uncertainty and cut vehicle speeds. But neither decreasing vehicle speeds nor maximizing safety is the singular goal of the road system, and the article seems to completely miss that.

> Rules, controls, signs, traffic lights all reduce our awareness of our surroundings and thus our sense of danger.

Even if true, I would expect that rules and signals afford us much more predictive power about nearby moving objects, which could be far more valuable than an increased a sense of danger.

> A crossing is where everyone should be watching everyone else, but everyone is watching the lights. They are awaiting orders. When given them, they assume all is safe and crash on.

If everyone's watching and obeying the lights, then how do the crashes happen?

Of course, they happen because of the people not obeying the lights. What reason is there to believe that the same driver who would run a red light (by accident or otherwise) would generally make better ad-hoc judgments without the light?

You could argue that drivers already obeying traffic lights could also avoid accidents by also watching other drivers, but they can already do that. You can argue that removing the lights will force them to do that, but it's not clear that's a _net_ positive (i.e., would ad-hoc human decisions really be better on average?). That argument would also undermine the article's claim that the existing system of lights represents our attachment to the nanny state.

Edit: I am in the UK, and usually cycle in towns.

The town I grew up in is about a 10 minute drive from the main highway, along a country road. Between the highway and the town there are something like 50+ signs, in a 15km stretch.

Local attractions promoted by the local government; speed limits; directions to various villages and towns; that this road was recently improved by the Provincial Government (sign coincidentally in the most recent political party's favourite colour); warning that there's a traffic light up ahead; oh don't forget you're on provincial road #whatever.

The result is one of two things: you either spend too many brain cycles focusing on them (and not the road), or you completely ignore all of them (possibly to your detriment).

I anxiously await the coming of the autonomous vehicle so that these problems go away.

Short version: after repealing helmet laws in Michigan, they have seen higher injury severity and mortality.

If that traffic light were removed I would go a lot slower through that intersection, as would most people. Perhaps there would be fewer wrecks, and at low speeds any wrecks certainly would be less harmful.

But that would come at the expense of backing up that highway.

Some road design decisions are made to facilitate speed and throughput, not safety.

I'm highly dubious that it's a good idea for high capacity or high speed areas. I cannot even begin to imagine how effective the over capacity freeways in the Seattle metro area would be without their stripes. Nor can I imagine what other major metro areas would experience.

In the unmarked road case, people will eventually learn to act in their own self interest, which probably means zooming around the slowpoke.

This will result in (a) very little, (b) a head on collision (c) the sudden termination of the 8 year old that was riding their bike in the road - which is why the original idiot was driving at 25 in the first place.

There's a solution that takes the best of both worlds: clearly marked and enforceable road markings made to deliberately slow traffic by requiring more attentiveness:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2569375/Council-clai...

I seem to recall hearing about this approach in the mid 90s; I wonder if it came about as part of the same research mentioned in the article.

I'm iffy about the removal of lane marking in all but quiet residential roads, but I'm definitely onboard with narrower lanes.

Surely that effect is temporary?

To me, the lines on the road and the traffic signals are not there to make me feel safe; they're there to provide Schelling points. If I have two-way traffic on a road with no line down the middle, how do I know where the division between lanes is? And more importantly, how do I know all the other drivers will think it's in the same place I think it is? The line is a simple solution to that problem. Similarly, if I come to an intersection and there is a 4-way stop sign, how do I know when it's my turn? And more importantly, how do I know all the other drivers will think it's my turn when I think it is? Traffic lights are a simple solution to that problem. The article just assumes that the root cause of accidents is drivers behaving recklessly, rather than drivers making different judgments about where boundaries are. But it presents no data to support that.

Also, at the end of the article, we get this:

"Traffic engineers, who maim and kill us with their regulations, lights and paint pots, merely go on dreaming up ever more of them. They pretend they are making our lives safer when they are doing the exact opposite. And we let them."

This suggests a completely different root cause of the problem: the people who put the boundaries and regulations in place bear no responsibility if they turn out to be badly placed. If that really is the root cause, the solution is obvious: make the people who place the boundaries--the traffic engineers--legally liable for making the boundaries function properly. If painted lines down the middle of the road, or traffic lights, increase accidents, make the traffic engineers pay. That would give them an incentive to only make regulations that are net benefits. But of course the article does not talk about such a solution at all; it only talks about fighting one one-size-fits-all regulation with another.

Btw, I am not advocating the above solution; I am merely saying that it is a logical consequence of the observation I quoted from the article. To me, the correct solution to what the article claims is the problem--lack of incentive for personal responsibility--is to increase the incentive for personal responsibility. You don't do that by removing obvious Schelling points for coordinating behavior, like lines on roads and traffic signals. You do that by making people suffer the consequences of wrong decisions. If you are at fault in an accident, your insurance company should raise your rates. If you are at fault in a serious enough accident, you might not be able to afford to drive at all. If we have a problem with personal responsibility in our society, it's because we refuse to acknowledge that responsibility has to work that way if it is to work at all.

Automated vehicles will solve this entire problem, and in the meantime I'll go with what we've learned by, you know, actually driving over academic theorizing.