Urban Design: Why Don't We Do It in the Road? Modifying Traffic Behavior through Legible Urban Design

摘要

Step off the bus or the train on arrival in any town or city. The backdrop to your first impression will be determined by the history, landscape, topography and architecture of the place. Buildings, and their interrelationships, will be inspiring or depressing, depending on the creative efforts of man and nature. We know we are in Bath, Baltimore, or Berlin by a unique, complex mixture of natural and artificial landmarks and symbols that provide the data for our mental maps and our memories. Yet, the foreground to our experience of cities is very different. It is likely to have been fashioned neither by natural processes, nor by the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of architecture or the design professions. The immediate, close-up environment of almost all our cities is determined by curbs, asphalt, road markings, bollards, traffic signals, barriers, and signs. We will negotiate our journey into and through the city amidst a landscape fashioned by traffic engineering. The rules that govern this landscape have little in common with the special cultural history and values that will have shaped the architecture and the unique signature of place. Indeed, the overarching principle governing the foreground has its roots in the desire for consistency, conformity, and predictability. Traffic engineering seeks uniformity and unambiguous clarity, demanding the same standards, dimensions, and hardware whatever the backdrop.