octaft
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April 30, 2014, 06:49:18 PM

pure example of why control and centralisation is useless and can be avoided with minimum harm:



http://www.tuxboard.com/photos/2014/04/pas-besoin-de-rond-point.gif

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/controlled-chaos-european-cities-do-away-with-traffic-signs-a-448747.html

Everyone who bashed this GIF with no second thought or research proved they are completely clueless in life.

Removing all traffic laws and signs (except a few like 50 km/h speed limit in towns) made traffic more fluent, safer and faster on average.
The Autobahns have significantly fewer accidents NORMALIZED for traffic volume than many other highways.
This movement will most likely become more widespread.

It goes with the Clarkson quote with spikes in the steering wheel and a few other ideas from behavioural economics:
1. People ignore >70% of traffic signs, and much more in the US where the sign spam is completely out of control.
2. People read recommendations as mandatory
    a. Lacking speed limits, most people drive at their comfort speed. Speed LIMITS are by definition above the comfort zone of most people; otherwise they are inefficiently low. With speed limits, people drive at speed limits or above (usually) even if that is no longer comfortable for them (i.e. how tired they are).
    b. When banks recommend a MAXIMUM of ~34% monthly income to go to house mortgage, the vast majority of people take that as default and end up over-extending.

In short, if you take the signs away, people drive more carefully and organically, minding their surroundings. This is completely foreign to US drivers due to feelings of entitlement and "being in the right" no matter what the local traffic conditions are. That's also one of the main causes for how many accidents there are on the US highways (mostly, in merging and lane changing).

In my home city, in my mostly lawless-driving EU country, people routinely drive at 100+ km/h during the night in cities, even if the speed limit is the classic 50. Almost all accidents happen when drivers were DUI, racing or irresponsible local-mafia brats.

Y'all really need to get your head out of the "we need to control you or you would kill eachother" arsehole. I though "antifragile" was trending?

The population of most of the places they mention are like 10k or less people. The place where the "utopia" has become a "reality" has a population of about 1000 people, and that's according to the article itself.