Remove all traffic lights and roundabouts?

[knitware]

I just had a thought, what would happen if the UK were to remove all roundabouts and traffic lights, would it be gridlock or would the road run a little freer. Whenever I see a set of lights not working people seem to manage to negotiate themselves quite well and it just seems to flow.

It could be absolutely chaos though…

[kambites]

When lights stop working around here (which they regularly do) the whole system grinds to a halt, even in surprisingly light traffic.

[littleredrooster]

A couple of years ago, Coventry City Council removed all signs, markings, kerbs and lights from the city centre. There were no marked junctions, no demarcation for pedestrians.

The theory was that everyone would take much more care and incidents would reduce.

The first thing that happened was that an elderly pedestrian was killed by a bus.

[ShayneJ]

i suppose it depends where you are.
im my old town when there was a wide spread power failure
dropping the signals off the traffic flow seemed much better
but then the council there were a psudocommunist car hating
right on bunch of morons so the lights were probably sequenced
to cause congestion for them to be seen to do something about.

the place the peoples republic of Walsall.
which is why i now live on the Berkshire downs~!

[Impasse]

littleredrooster said:

A couple of years ago, Coventry City Council removed all signs, markings, kerbs and lights from the city centre. There were no marked junctions, no demarcation for pedestrians.

The theory was that everyone would take much more care and incidents would reduce.

The first thing that happened was that an elderly pedestrian was killed by a bus.

Remove buses.

[anonymous-user]

i think it worked in Germany, where pedestrians and cars share same space.

[jamieduff1981]

I think a look at the average Indian or Chinese major junction should give a reasonable indication of what happens when everyone gets used to the idea of no real order or means of enforcement.

I for one don't have it in me to slow down to a glacial pace of life spending 10 minutes crawling across one junction.

[djt100]

I read a few years ago about all the traffic lights in a town being turned off, cannot for the life of me remember how long for or the name of the town, but the results were that overall traffic flow improved, but it was not viable to do full time for safely reasons..

Going to bug me now so off to google....