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Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

Well, we could be living in a situation where pedestrians take precedence and have right of way over cars in city streets, and the opposite in highways, which I think would be much more desirable, especially in crowded cities. Perhaps even ban cars except for abutters, commercial vehicles and emergency vehicles from the densest city center areas. God that would be a relief.

edit: OK, yes, obviously you can and should distinguish between streets and roads, the former being smaller and mainly for residents and visitors of a subsector of the area (who can play hacky-sack on their residential street if they so well please, and you still have to wait for them), and the latter being mainly for car transportation in and out of the area itself. You can prioritize humans in one and cars in the other.

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It's already true in many places, in a lot of European cities you see a sign like this when entering:

https://lsmlomza.pl/pliki/2014/03/lsm-znak1.jpg

And it basically means that pedestrians have an absolute priority before cars, they can walk on the street as much as they like and you as a driver have to exhibit some extreme attention because if anything happens, it's 99% certain you will be found at fault.

Is that sign real? It is awful design. The meaning is complete obscure to me.

Maybe drivers slow down to contemplate the sign!

At first glance, I read it as "caution, children at play". But I assume that if this is a standard sign, it would be covered on the drivers license test in that country.

Caution signs are red-bordered triangles.

Warning of children in/near the road: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Ma...

It does exist, although the particular image linked here seems to be a Photoshop-copy (I don't think the scales are correct).

As for the obscurity: A lot of traffic signs are, you learn their meaning in driving school.

It is real. Usually not used city-wide, but for particular areas/neighborhoods.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street

In Europe you have to demonstrate knowing traffic signs before you get a driver's license. They usually are graphics, not text like in US.

>In Europe you have to demonstrate knowing traffic signs before you get a driver's license.

I'm unaware of any state in which you don't have to do the same to get a learner's permit.

Test questions are a mix of obscure regulatory stuff (e.g. "what is the penalty for a 1 time DUI if the offender is age X and they have had Y speeding tickets in the last $X months?"), identifying signage (e.g. "a do not enter sign is what shape and colors?") and describing the appropriate action in a particular situation.

>They usually are graphics, not text like in US.

Literacy is technically optional to read signs in the US as well. Only auxiliary information is communicated via text. You'd just spend a lot of time waiting around when you could take a right on red or do a lot less sitting at red lights depending on whether you acknowledge the presence of signs you can't read.

Driving is more important to being a functioning member of society so in general we make getting a license easier and don't bend you over quite so hard if you do things wrong on the road. It varies a lot by state.

It is very much real. And it's a standardized design, meaning it's taught during mandatory driver training(which includes a test on road signs):

http://i.iplsc.com/-/0006J53JX8C294TS-C411.jpg

Those signs differ from country to country, but the design is very similar. In Germany this sign looks like this

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrsberuhigter_Bereich#/me...

The official meaning is "begining of a traffic calming area" (verkehrsberuhigter Bereich) but most people call it "Spielstraße" (literal translation "street for playing"). I don't know if the sign was designed after the common term for those streets or vice versa.

Swedish version means ”walking-speed area”: https://www.transportstyrelsen.se/sv/vagtrafik/Trafikregler/...

It is blue and rectangular, which means it shows positive information ("this may be done").

The picture is an adult and child playing on the street. This street is for adults and children to play in.

In practise, in countries where it's less common it will have a text description, and you'd then recognize it abroad even when you don't understand the text: http://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/uploads/3/2/9/2/3292309/publi...

Circular blue must be done. Pedestrians must use this path: https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/footway-sign-picture-id...

Red-bordered circles forbid something: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/no-pedestrians-road-sign-253...

And red-bordered triangels warn of something: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Singapor...

You should now understand all the road signs used outside the USA and Australia :-)

We use a slightly different sign in France that shows cyclists as well: https://goo.gl/maps/nHA4rtqPcrG2

In practice, many drivers do not like them, but it's probably because they are never pedestrians in those places. I often drive, bike and walk in the place shown above and I really find it nice, even if you sometimes have to wait for a minute or so for pedestrians to cross.

> It is awful design. The meaning is complete obscure to me.

It's fine. It's just not the kind of sign you are thinking of.

There are at least two kinds of sign.

One kind tells you what the rules are or gives you specific instructions. An example of this kind of sign would be one that tells you that you must wear ear protection, or one that tells you that you must wear a hard hat.

Another kind tells you that you are in a region where a special set of rules apply. Examples are construction zone signs and school zone signs. These signs don't tell you WHAT the rules are, they just tell you that you are entering a place where the rule set changes from one well known set to a different well known set.

From what others have said, it seems this sign is the second kind. It's telling you that you are entering a region where the streets are shared more equally between cars, pedestrians, and playing children than they are in most places, and so you need to follow the rules that apply to such regions instead of the regular traffic rules.

Almost all European road signs are ideographic, for obvious reasons, much more so than US signs. And they are, of course, tested as part of licensing.

There's a design language you learn: circular for mandatory, triangular for advisory, square for informational. Blue background for positive, red border for negative.

When you have many languages to contend with and limited space images attempting to illustrate a concept are still more useful than words. The EU is such a place. That sign means 'woonerf' to me in NL, in Germany it would be read as 'Wohngebiet' and so on.

The idea is that this is an area where people live, and where cars, playing children and pedestrians can be expected to mix. To drivers this is a strong indication that they need to take great care when maneuvering because just about anything can happen. Typically the sign is accompanied by an explicit speed limit of 10 or 15 km/hour, or, alternatively it is encoded in the local bylaws but that doesn't really help for visiting traffic.

The whole idea behind traffic signs is not that you can decode them if you have never seen them before (though that is a nice benefit if you can have it) but that given some basic rules and a small booklet of those signs you can learn them by heart and the basic rules will help you to distinguish in case you forgot a sign or weren't sure.

As such this one is pretty clear, all the elements on it are also present on other traffic signs and the blue rectangle tells the rest of the story. As a driver I have no problem understanding this sign in isolation without looking up its definition, the sign is also common enough around here that you can understand what it means by the context within which it is placed.

It is on drivers tests, though, so that helps. The general idea (there are kids playing and people walking) seems to get across.

Incidentally it drove me crazy when I saw big red X's in circles upon moving to a place with European signage. It always felt wrong to proceed, when in fact the sign means don't stop. https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/50403/what-does-t...

Some of us do.

I work in and regularly travel through towns and cities that have various streets and junctions marked with the "shared space" designation for about five years now. Said towns and cities have furthermore had pedestrian precincts for decades.

Coventry's plans for pedestrian precincts go back to World War 2; it has had one since 1953. Exeter beat it by 1 year.

* https://www.historiccoventry.co.uk/postwar/postwar.php?pg=pr...

It would be chaos. You’d have some jackass walking in the middle of the street as slow as possible, meanwhile people who actually have some place to go are all sitting around waiting on some fool who wants to play hacky-sack in the street.

Then you stop relying on moter transport and start using your legs in cities.

And when the nearest home you can afford is 15 miles away?

Any realistic plan includes high quality public transit, with at least some of it at street level.

Ok, so you have a limited number of public transport only roads and add restrictions on crossing those. Or you just follow the UK system and have no restrictions other than fear pedestrians will get hit and you reach a natural equilibrium where drivers avoid certain areas.

That doesn't happen with sidewalks because the vast majority of people have at least a tiny bit of politeness and will make way for someone trying to get through. For the extremely rare people who wouldn't, I assume that the police would stop by and get the person to move out of the way, just as they would if people were intentionally obstructing a sidewalk.

Generally no, because the roads you use to go places aren't designed like that. If you're facing a road designed as a shared space, you should probably be within a couple of hundred metres of one end or the other of your journey, maximum.

At current city density scales? It wouldn't work

New technologies require new ways of organizing things, in the same way nothing is expected to take precedence from a train in a shared crossing. It is technologically infeasible

Did the automakers invent 'crossing a red light' as well? Did they invent the parking meter?

>New technologies require new ways of organizing things...

I think it's pretty clear by now that organizing whole cities around the automobile was a huge step in the wrong direction and the sooner we begin to correct it the better. Just look at Copenhagen as a shining example of a city that began re-focusing its traffic on actual people (and not f*ing metal boxes taking up way too much space) decades ago.

Copenhagen isn’t McMansions on quarter acre lots, while most Americans panic at the suggestion of any density level higher than that. Permission to play in the street won’t fix low suburban density or the low effective density of high rise neighborhoods that are mostly vacant investment properties.

> Permission to play in the street won’t fix low suburban density

It can help, if it means parents feel less need for private gardens.

Or apartment blocks with their own enclosed playgrounds.

Well yes and no not really cites would have been covered in horse dung a major health issue in pre automobile days.

Yes, I've been to Copenhagen and they still have traffic lights and pedestrian lights

The fact that you're not prioritizing the car doesn't mean you can leave pedestrians and cars to self-organize

Traffic lights are for organizing cars, that's the whole point of the article. Pedestrians and bycyclists are just bystanders that suffers greatly from them.

Waiting for the lights to turn green for your right of way (something that cars also have to do) is "suffering greatly" now?

As opposed to being able to just freely walk around as you please? You could say that, why not.

And if one insists on moving a 2 ton metal cage through a city going 30 mph or more, I think having to wait now and then is a reasonable trade-off. The natural habitat of the car is the highway and that's where it should stay.

I love cars, but they can not handle intersections at all.

For me personally it's a great injustice that cars are so valued that I am supposed to breath one of the worst kinds of air pollutions every other morning for 180 seconds while waiting for red light at just one intersection.

If someone wants to play soccer in front of the bus or tram, what do you do? Just shut down the public transit system that day? Tell all the commuters to turn around and go home? The city is cancelled today because streets aren’t for transportation?

You're attacking a strawman.

How is it a strawman? If motor traffic can only move at pedestrians’ leisure, what happens if they decline to let it through for hours at a time? The soccer players would be committing no crime - the streets are for them first, motor vehicles last.

I'm confident that society would be able to figure out a reasonable law and rely on a reasonable justice system to figure out abusive edge cases.

People playing in a “street for playing” is an edge case?

If the law recognizes some kind of duty to yield and let traffic through, we’re back at status quo.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Right of way is the right to use the road as a highway, not for another purpose. That applies to motorists just as it applies to other road users.

Half of this “streets for people” stuff is about using the street as a public living room, with people sitting, hanging out, playing, etc., not just walking. I’d definitely support shared space that still gives priority to public transit vehicles moving through.

You create a legal distinction between right of way and 'right of blockage'. Such a thing might exist already.

At least in England, you prosecute them for obstructing traffic. Even if you have a right of way, you have a right to cross the road, not sit down in it.

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