Reuters reports that a town in Germany is taken the rather radical action of removing all traffic lights in order to lessen the frequency of road accidents.

From September 12, all traffic controls will disappear from the center of the western town of Bohmte to try to reduce accidents and make life easier for pedestrians.

I say that Cairo has “implemented” that approach since, well, forever. Of course, the results so far are questionable, to say the least, but that’s besides the point. The point is we have been pioneers in a ground-breaking approach to road safety and we didn’t know! They call it “Shared Space” in Europe, but I will reclaim our right to name the approach as the “Cairo School of Thought on Traffic Management”. Hell, Cairo is essentially one large “shared space”. It is not just shared space, it is a friggin traffic battlefield.

[the ideas] have already been implemented in the town of Drachten in the north of the Netherlands, where all stop lights, traffic signs, pavements, and street markings have gone.

Any Cairenes reading this will immediately have a familiar mental image of such fine disregard for the aforementioned unnecessary urban ornaments.

The beauty of the Cairene system is that we have not completely done away with traffic lights. We merely discarded their functional uses and decided to retain the hardware for purely decorative and psychological purposes. They still flash red, yellow and green and make for a neurovisual sedative (is there even such a thing?) for road-rage crazed Cairene motorists.

I predict a few problems will face our unsuspecting German friends though:

• The German town in question, Bohmte , has a puny daily traffic flow of 13,500 cars. That’s weak, at best, by Cairo standards. Traffic is just not intense enough for even a pilot phase!


• German pedestrians have not been adequately conditioned to cope with the dynamics of survival in the so called “shared space” of people and vehicles. Releasing such green subjects into the freshly liberated traffic wilderness is potentially catastrophic. For an excellent example of this see this story.