Traffic patterns of the 21st century

As I was surfing the internet the other day I came across an interesting article about city planning, and traffic control in the Netherlands. The article "European Cities Do Away With Traffic Signs,(http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448747,00.html)" it is quite interesting.



In the Netherlands, city planners are removing street signs, traffic lights, no parking signs, and even lane markings. They want all forms of traffic to interact in a more human, less regulated way. They say that all that is bad about traffic is improved with deregulation. Planners say that it forces motorists to be more careful about how they drive and their speed.
I cannot speak from experience but I think I would be a nervous wreck competing with pedestrians, cyclists, runners, old ladies walking at .5mph down the middle of the street,etc. I don't know if I would be able to handle not having lanes, or some sort of regulation at intersections.

I could to deal with the increase in bicycle traffic, but I couldn't deal with people just walking down the middle of the street. This no regulation idea is a terrible Idea. What happens when traffic increases as cities grow, and how would such a lack of regulation work in American cities with grid street patterns? People are not that civilized in America, manners don't exist anymore. I don't think this system could work in an American city.

I am for some deregulation, parking where ever you want for example, but with no regulation and such high population density it would just be a nightmare! Cars wouldn't be very practical on streets who's speed is realistically limited to the top speeds of the slowest user. I would go as far to say that the current automobile could not exist in these types of traffic situations.

What European Planners want us to do is go back to the middle ages. Their cities might be able to handle that, but a Modern Grid street city could not. The photo included in this post is a street scene c. 1910 in Chicago. If you look up American street scene photographs from the turn of the century, it is utter chaos. The streets are jammed with every type of vehicle imaginable and they are literally jammed! These photographs are the strongest evidence against deregulation of traffic.

Our entire road system would have to be rebuilt to allow for such a lack of regulation. In old European cities roads wind, they are not straight, they have narrow alleyways, and few roads. The roads they do have, seem to have a natural flow.

American cities on the other hand, are standardized. They were build with the automobile and bicycle in mind, and were designed to work with the regulation of traffic. Having streets that go North, South, East and West at unregulated intersections would cause traffic jams.

Everyone cannot go every direction at once. That was the point of regulating traffic. I do not think the European planners could import their anarchy to the modern city with much success. If this plan did cross the Atlantic it could only be used in limited areas and it could not be city wide. American cities are not designed to handle traffic like that, it would just result in widespread gridlock.

Technology and Society

I can't help but think that this western world that we live in just isn't good enough. I keep seeing all these technological advances, and new ways of communicating, and new gadgets, and things meant to entertain us, and keep thinking that this isn't the way it's supposed to be.

It seems like all this progressive technology never lives up to what it promises. I look back on the industrial revolution and see a crescendo of life altering and life improving technologies. Then suddenly it seems from about WWII onwards the promise that all this knowledge and science and technology holds becomes less meaningful and less good and becomes something more akin to an unstoppable monster.

We are loosing our very humanity. It used to be that people would actually talk to each other, face to face. Then came computers and cellphones and the internet and it's all gone. Even as I blog on the internet there is no real social interaction, no reading of body language, no smells, or tactial sensations. It doesn't seem real.

I see the western world and see that we are all withdrawing from society and I hate it. I loved technology, I used to dream of being the next Edison, or Henry Ford, inventing the next big thing, the next life altering technology, but I see now that technology cannot fix the problems of the world.

It takes people face to face, discussing, arguing, planning, thinking, and yes, sometimes fighting. I want that. I want to be in a real society, a real culture, something tangible, something physical.

These computers are great machines, but they are just that, machines. No more capable of being human, than a tree could be human, and yet we treat these machines as extensions of our own bodies. Our tongues, our minds, our memories, and we even let these machines mimic the physical world.

I don't dispute the amazing capabilities these machines have to do work, work that would take millennia, in some cases for humans to do, but they are still just machines. I used to long for life in the 1920's but as I got older and I studied the 1920's I realized that they weren't that great, and I began to long for the 19th century and then I read Thoreau and longed for times even earlier, pre industrial revolution.

I realized that what happened in the industrial revolution was just a precursor to today. The beginning of the disconnect that is making itself evident in my generation. Technology used to evolve over centuries, and society had time to evaluate the good and the bad of new technologies. That is not the case anymore, it just comes at us too fast, ever changing, never content, ever improving, never perfect.

I long for the good old days. Days when life was short, and brutish, but at least it was real. People used to live in communities, tribes, cities, nations that were based on real person to person contact. Those are the days I miss.

Technology is great but what good is it if it takes our humanity away? What good is it if it robes us of human contact, and real physical near-distance communication.

What I absolutely hate about this hyper connected, but still lonely existence we call modern living is the total and complete lack of privacy, secrecy and personal rights. It used to be, before the twentieth century that biggest intrusion into your personal life was the town gossip. Now the government, Big brother, corporations, your employers, and random strangers all know what your up to. That GPS, while great if you don't have a map can also track you. That Email you sent out bashing your boss could come back to haunt you. There is no privacy, only the illusion of privacy, and forget about rights to secrecy. They know what your up to and that just sucks!

I long for the days before the microchip, before the transistor, before trains, planes, or automobiles, before Gasoline, or steam, or even steel, before police(yes, there was a time), before Shire reeves, and kings, and czars, and dukes before all of that. You see because, while life was short and brutish back in those days, life was pure, you knew your purpose, you only had a few options, only a few possessions, you were free to do as you pleased as long as you fed, clothed, and housed your family. If indeed you had a family at all.

There are only a few jobs in the world that I want, and sadly all of them have been taken, long ago, and been made completely obsolete. I don't want to be an inventor any more, I see that technology doesn't solve problems it only magnifies, or creates new ones. I don't want to be involved in this modern life.

No, the life I want to live and the people I look up to are the adventurers, the explorers, the traders that journeyed across vast distances of the globe, over the alps or through deserts carrying that little trinket from a distant culture. That real tangible item, made, or found, or grown by a real human being from another place. Or the messenger, traveling across vast distances to deliver an important message, to foster communication, person to person, the Telecommunication of old.

Those are the people I look up to, those are the people I want to be like. It is the reason I am an athlete, so that I can do what those ancient people did. Move through God's magnificent creation, exploring, learning, and communicating with people all over the world. That is what life should be about, this technology is just a dangerous distraction forcing us to give up our very humanity for sake of the machine.

I wish I could give up this glorified type writer for real society but, if I did that I would have no society, no community, no people, so for now I'll keep typing, and continuing to be just another slave to the machine.