One False Move and You’re Dead! This alarmingly stark and simple message stands alongside a close-up of a teenager’s feet on the edge of a kerb, on the huge billboards of the 1980s government road-safety campaign poster (Figure 2.8.1). The clarity of the image is enhanced by the absence of any surrounding context – there are no buildings or other people or activity in the background. It is a message about everywhere and nowhere. It was part of an ambitious campaign to improve pedestrian safety by influencing walking patterns and removing children from the threat of traffic, reinforcing the notion of a strong conceptual boundary to separate the world of the pedestrian from the world of traffic. The penalties for transgressing this boundary were severe indeed!
Figure 2.8.1 One False Move UK road-safety campaign, 1980s
Source: Department for Transport Archives
The One False Move campaign represents one memorable manifestation of the principle of physical and psychological separation that dominated architecture, urban planning and traffic engineering for much of the twentieth century. The appearance of the motor vehicle in significant numbers during the 1920s prompted a fundamental re-evaluation of the relationship between movement and public space. Traditionally, streets and the spaces between buildings had served the simultaneous demands for both movement and the exchanges and human interactions that constitute civic life. For Le Corbusier and other delegates at the CIAM Congress of Athens of 1933, there was ‘no place for the street with its traffic’ in the modern city.1
Nowhere was the principle of segregation of traffic from civic life more clearly articulated and persuasively argued than in the 1963 Traffic in Towns, the report of the committee chaired by Colin Buchanan to advise government policy on urban planning and transport.2 The central conclusion of this influential study called for systematic segregation between pedestrian and vehicular worlds. The pedestrian precinct, overbridges and underpasses, barriers and physical separation emerge as essential components of urban form. It was a message strongly endorsed by government policy and professional institutions in many countries. ‘Segregation should be the keynote of modern road design’ was the first sentence of the UK government’s 1965 Roads in Urban Areas. It seemed a self-evident truth that the requirements for efficient and safe movement of traffic were fundamentally incompatible with the qualities of urban space. Notions of public space and pedestrian boundaries had to be redefined. Hence, the need for the safety campaign to restrain the movement of teenagers – One False Move and You’re Dead!
As we approach the second century of motorised movement, our understanding of the relationship between driver behaviour, traffic and the qualities of public space is changing rapidly. The publication in the UK of Manual for Streets 2 in 20103 and the emergence of shared space and integrated streets as design concepts have begun to establish a fundamentally contrasting paradigm for streets and urban spaces, in place of separation and segregation. This chapter looks at some of the theoretical and practical background to this change, and its implica -tions for the relationship between architecture, urban design and traffic engineering. It is a change that builds on a growing understanding of behavioural psychology and the influence of place and context on human interaction and movement, and especially the relationship between drivers and the complex, unpredictable and fragile world of pedestrian activity.
Drive a car into Exhibition Road in Kensington, West London, and you will find that, although you are still on the public highway, most characteristics of the familiar urban street have disappeared (Figures 2.8.2 and 2.8.3). Road markings, pedestrian crossings, traffic signals, signs and high kerbs have been replaced by a new layout and spatial arrangement. The diagonal paving pattern of the surface materials continues unbroken from building to building across the street. Boundaries between the carriageway and the pavement are more subtle, and street furniture, lighting and paving combine to create a single, unified space. For the driver, the experience can be slightly unnerving, especially where bicyclists and pedestrians are milling around and where the museums, Imperial College and the other great institutional buildings spill out into the space. As a driver, you have to concentrate and remain alert. Your speed drops, not because of the 20-mph speed limit, but because there is so much to take in. Conventional separation of the carriageway from urban life has vanished, leaving some ambiguity about priorities, ownership and permission.
Exhibition Road is unusual. Its recent transformation was the ambitious and expensive outcome of London’s leading politicians’ and the Mayor’s determination to create a street of appropriate cultural significance in this richly endowed corner of the capital. But Exhibition Road is not an isolated example. It represents a more widespread and growing realisation of a new paradigm for traffic in towns. It demonstrates an approach equally relevant for the design, management and maintenance of small, rural high streets and village centres, and reflects an attempt to minimise the adverse impacts of traffic on the economics, social fabric and quality of life, wherever movement and civic life are expected to coexist.
Figure 2.8.2 Exhibition Road, London: an experiment in combining traffic and pedestrians
Source: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Figure 2.8.3 Exhibition Road, bus and milk float move slowly through a space also used by people
Source: Photograph by Ben Hamilton-Baillie