Is Wilder Better?

According to Wired, a new trend in traffic management and highway engineering is to remove explicit controls—such as signs and painted lines on the road, and even curbs to separate street from pedestrian zone—and replace them with implicit controls—basically the alertness and cooperation of the drivers, pedestrians, or bicyclists using the roads. One advocate of this new hands-off approach explains:

“Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”

So the idea, generally, is that you encourage community and cooperation by removing the safeguards that would keep you safe if you're antisocial or don't try to cooperate. What's interesting is the corollary argument that social safeguards actually encourage antisocial behavior; they assume such behavior is going to occur, they plan for it, they legitimize it, and therefore ensure it will exist. Does this mean that the more we regulate or try to make our world safer, the more we'll actually be making our world more chaotic, and less safe? The idea reminds me of two stories I tell all the time (and which I've probably told here before). Both are about lifelong NYC residents who visited Utah. One was a woman who stood on the edge of Bryce Canyon watching a beautiful sunrise and complained that “they should cut down all these trees—they're blocking my view. The other was another woman who stood on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and complained that there was no railing to prevent people from falling over the edge. These stories come to mind because I think of NYC as a place that's tightly controlled and regulated; the population density is so great, that people have come to rely on the ”rules“ of life in NYC to get by, so when they go someplace that's more open, less tightly controlled, they don't understand it, it makes them uncomfortable. (I'm thinking out loud here; I don't mean to disparage NY or NYers.) Those two stories, and the above article about the roads make me wonder if what we need is fewer laws, rather than more. We seem to have entered a stage of society where people will do anything, so long as there's no explicit rule or law against it, or even if there is a law but they think they won't get caught. See Enron, see the rise in plagiarism and cheating in our schools, see the general lust for wealth above all else. And I wonder if this is because people have stopped thinking about what's right, what's appropriate, what's good, and instead simply think about what they can get away with w/out breaking the rules or getting caught. As if the rules of society, or efforts to encourage better behavior, actually end up encouraging worse behavior. Does chaos encourage cooperation? I suppose it's the logic behind the Libertarian Party. Another siren singing, I think, but also there's something here that's good...

Posted December 9, 2004 08:27 AM | life generally