#84 2003 · Municipality of Drachten (traffic engineer Hans Monderman) · Public infrastructure / traffic safetywrong-door
Drachten deleted the traffic lights, curbs and signs at its worst junction and crashes fell nine-to-one
the problem
A busy junction kept producing accidents no amount of signage, signals or enforcement fixed
background
Laweiplein, Drachten's main junction in the Dutch province of Friesland, carried roughly 22,000 vehicles a day through a standard signal-controlled intersection, and it produced accidents at a rate typical of that kind of junction: about nine per year through the 1990s. The standard playbook for a dangerous junction was more control — brighter signals, clearer signage, stricter enforcement — and every town in the Netherlands had already run that playbook without eliminating the accident rate, because drivers who trust the infrastructure to manage risk stop managing it themselves.
Hans Monderman, a Frisian provincial traffic engineer who had spent two decades studying accident data, had come to the opposite conclusion from his profession's default: that formal traffic controls let drivers relax into autopilot, and that autopilot, not a lack of signage, was the accident's real cause. Removing the controls was politically almost impossible to propose to a town council whose job was to look responsible for road safety — the electorate's assumption is that fewer signs means more danger, not less.
the move
In 2003 Monderman redesigned Laweiplein as a 'shared space': a single paved square with no traffic lights, no curbs separating cars from cyclists and pedestrians, and no lane markings, built around a small roundabout and fountains instead of a signal box. Drivers, cyclists and pedestrians were left to negotiate the crossing by eye contact and yielded right-of-way instead of by obeying a light.
the payoff
Annual accidents at the junction fell from roughly nine per year before the redesign to about one per year afterward, even as traffic volume held around 22,000 vehicles a day and average crossing time dropped from about 50 seconds to 30. Cyclist and motorist self-reported feelings of safety slightly declined even as the actual accident count fell — the discomfort was the mechanism, not a side effect of it.
what came after
Laweiplein became the reference case for the international 'shared space' movement; Monderman went on to design more than 100 such schemes before his death in 2008, and versions were later built in the UK, Germany and elsewhere. Some shared-space schemes, including later ones in the Netherlands, were reversed after public pressure over subjective unease despite the safety data — a reminder that the mechanism works on drivers even when it unsettles the people voting on whether to keep it.
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references
- [1]Shared spaceWikipedia, 2026en.wikipedia.org
- [2]Signal FailureTIME, 2008time.com