Wonderful Waterloo Archive

I was recently lucky to vacation in Italy. When not marvelling at the glory that is Rome, I found myself watching traffic. I know it sounds weird.

I even made a side trip to the Appian Way, the famous Roman road built to surprisingly modern standards 2,300 years ago. Sections are still used today, lined by ancient ruins and tombs.

We chuckled at the tiny toy cars they drive. You quickly grasp why small cars make sense. There’s little space for parking, urban roads are very narrow, and fuel costs twice what it does here.

I never saw an SUV. A parked Dodge minivan stood out like a full-sized Hummer does here. I could never have driven my truck there.

Roman drivers are experts in parallel parking. They squeeze into way-tight spaces and you wonder how they’ll get out. Then you notice all the scrapes and dents on so many fenders and bodies. Here, the rust would eat your car alive. But Rome is temperate so I presume the damage can go unrepaired.

Sometimes we watched tiny cars park perpendicular to the curb, in scooter spaces. Their snouts barely reached the driving lane. The parking credo seems to be: Whatever works.

Cars are restricted in Rome’s most popular pedestrian areas. We walked a lot so that helped. I can’t see it translating here because our most popular streets have only the tiniest fraction of pedestrians by comparison.

Even on wider Roman streets I didn’t see many painted lanes. Cars, small trucks and lots of scooters all competed for asphalt. Drivers seemed to pay attention to each other. Vehicles would yield and merge without signs telling them when and how.

The bicycle lanes I saw were segregated from traffic by a curb or painted on a sidewalk.

You had to be careful and use pedestrian crosswalks near faster commuter roads. But on lower-speed urban streets you could often step into the lane and drivers would stop for you, without leaning on horns.

My sense is that Roman drivers tend to view roads as shared spaces in which everyone uses their best judgment. That’s how I hope roundabouts will work here, to make us better drivers.

It may sound and look like traffic chaos. But there’s a lot to be said for fewer rules, better judgment.

I approach the four-way stop with trepidation. It is my fifth in 10 blocks and the ritual is beginning to grate.

I come to a halt at roughly the same time as two other cars, one to my left, one opposite me. The law is pretty clear: you yield right of way to the first vehicle to come to a complete stop. If two arrive at the same time the vehicle on the left must yield.

But we’re Canadians, so instead we try to do the polite thing and each of us attempts to out defer the other one. It is time to do the “Canadian Crawl.”

“After you,” I mouth with a gesture.

“No, after you,” the other guy replies.

“No, no, after you,” the driver to the left says.

“No, after you.”

And so it goes …

With each stuttering start the co-operative oh-so Canadian glow turns to frustrated fury.

“I’m letting you go, idiot, I’m being polite and cordial,” we’re all thinking. “Just drive your f***ing car through the four-way stop so we can all get going.”

Finally, as one of us is just about to take the initiative, a cyclist blows through the four-way without even slowing down. Why should he, right? Stop signs are for suckers and motorists. What if one of us car-dwellers also decided to ignore the stop? Apparently this scenario never crosses bicycle man’s cerebral cortex. United in our disbelief we finally putter on our way – until 15 seconds later when we will all inevitably find ourselves stuck at other four-way stops.

Sound familiar?

They talk of air pollution and noise pollution. They even warn us about light pollution. Here’s one more to add to the environmental list: sign pollution. We’re lost in a forest of signage.

What, you might ask, is wrong with a stop sign? Nothing, when needed, but the stop sign is now the default resolution to any and all traffic problems (second only to speed bumps). It’s simple for local planners and politicians (and most road regulation is done at the local level) to throw up a stop sign any time they don’t know what to do. It’s an easy fix. Have you got a street in need of a real solution but lack the will or smarts? Throw up a stop sign or better yet a four-way stop. Problem solved.

This pat answer has a troubling effect. We become inured to the signs erected to save us. John Straddon, an emeritus professor at Duke University in North Carolina, has been vociferous in his condemnation of the North American approach to road safety. Stop signs, he argued in a 2008 article in the Atlantic Monthly, are placed off to the side of the road, often hidden by trees (not in front of the driver where he should be looking). “Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment,” he wrote. “Stopping and starting uses more gas and vehicles pollute most when starting from rest.”

Currently there are two popular methods for dealing with stop signs. Some motorists observe them with obsessive scrupulousness. They come to full, vigorous stops. Wait, even if no one is around, and then plod on. These folks are annoying beyond description but not dangerous.

Others ignore stop signs entirely. It is now common to watch cars cruise through stop signs obliviously. The legendary “California Roll” or “Hollywood Stop” in which the driver cruises slowly through a stop sign was once a rare occurrence on Canadian streets but is now the norm. While this move feels safe for the driver it is fairly dangerous. For instance, when the “roller” glides through a stop turning right, he generally looks left (scanning for oncoming traffic) not right as he should be. Pedestrians beware.

Roads are now so “signed” that many motorists have stopped driving. We merely obey. Human judgment and skill get lost. Driving becomes robotic and inefficient. The worst side-effect of the stop sign glut is that it causes drivers to be less aware of cross traffic when driving. The responsibility shifts from the driver to the sign. “They look for signs,” Staddon observed, “and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.”

The Solution? Staddon wants to replace the four-way stop with roundabouts (common in Europe) and to emulate the “naked streets” wave that has been employed in 30 communities in Holland. This involved removing as many signs as possible and making motorists, cyclists and pedestrians actively share the road. No one has the right of way and everybody slows downs and drives smarter.

Of course, we’re not Europe and that may be the problem. Europeans, it’s fair to say, take driving very seriously. It’s much more difficult to get your driver’s license and owning a car in Europe is a status symbol. In North America, it’s a sign you need to get from Point A to Point B. Progressive European motoring solutions reflect this investment in car culture. Mindless North American solutions reflect the love-hate relationship we have with the automobile. We love cars but are ashamed to admit it.

It’s likely that in the time it took to read this article someone stuck up a stop sign. There is such an abundance of stop signs that people are now harvesting them. In Ontario’s Durham Region, more than 60 stop signs have been cut down. Police say the thief may be using the pressure treated wood to build a deck. Well, I don’t agree with the method but the idea is sound.

I agree that naked streets would receive opposition from the varied defenders of the status quo, but I don't think that would make them function here any differently than they do elsewhere.