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As we know, Wales has more sheep than people. In London, meanwhile, it sometimes seems as if the inhabitants are outnumbered by the traffic lights.
On Romney Road and Trafalgar Road, near my home in Greenwich, there are 11 sets of them over less than a mile.
There are pelican-crossing ones, which turn red throughout the day and night even when no pedestrian is near.
There are junction-control ones, regulating turnings into side streets that see about four cars an hour. There are even a couple which appear to have some genuine road management purpose.
Rather like herd animals calling to signal the presence of predators, you can hear the lights beep-beep-beeping down the chain to warn each other as enemy motorists approach.
But though they may be of many different breeds, London traffic lights are not that much like London people. They are all the same colour.
As, this week, Boris takes his first steps against the red menace, his task is huge. Between 2000 and 2006, TfL and the boroughs installed, on average, three new sets of traffic lights every single week.
The total number of locations covered by traffic lights is now 6,000, a fifth higher than it was at the turn of the century. The lights also, of course, stay red for longer.
The results are easy to see, and even easier to get stuck in. Even though the actual numbers of vehicles in central London went down after the congestion charge, and have stayed down, congestion is back to where it was before the charge started.
Pollution in some areas has reached all-time highs.
Vehicles idling at red lights then accelerating away from them, give off around two-and-a-half times more tailpipe emissions than vehicles moving smoothly.
All this is quite deliberate. Many of the new lights were explicitly installed not to smooth the traffic flow but to impede it.
The idea was to create what the old City Hall regime called a "hierarchy" of road users - with pedestrians and cyclists at the top, followed by bus passengers, followed by (shudder) motorists at the bottom, to be discouraged as much as possible.
It sounds fair enough. This is, after all, a city where around 45 per cent of all journeys are not made by car (TfL claims that 61 per cent of journeys are not made by car but it fiddles the figures by counting each time you change bus or train, plus the walk from your home to the bus stop or train station, as a new journey). It is also surely right that people should be encouraged not to drive.
Alas, the concept was applied too crudely. The hugely increased numbers of lights (and other obstructions such as road narrowing) have indeed inconvenienced motorists - but they have inconvenienced bus passengers just as much, if not more. And they have positively endangered cyclists. Red lights are hazardous places for us, which is why it is often safer (provided there are no pedestrians in the way) to skip them.
Important main roads used by relatively few pedestrians but thousands of cars - like Trafalgar Road in Greenwich - were given much the same blizzard of lights and traffic restrictions as pedestrian meccas like Oxford Street.
There are other objections to the plague of lights. They are ugly. They take our eyes off the road. They cost a fortune to install and run. Most of all they are, in the words of the neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, Professor Susan Greenfield, "a metaphor for disenfranchisement".
What she means is that they symbolise a world where individuals have to conform to the system, rather than where individuals are the system. British traffic management is authoritarian - it relies not just on red lights, but on acres of nasty grey railings to segregate pedestrians and traffic. It orders people around. It treats travel as a zero-sum game, where pedestrians can be helped only by taking things away from motorists.
In the Netherlands, by contrast, the celebrated urban pioneer Hans Monderman swept away the hideous paraphernalia of conventional road engineering, including the traffic lights, to create "shared space" for drivers and pedestrians. Both groups came out winners.
Vehicle speeds on these "naked streets" dropped dramatically from the old segregated thoroughfares, because drivers became more conscious of their surroundings and pedestrians could look them in the eye. Monderman found, and town planners all over the world are now finding, that trusting drivers to behave worked better than forcing them to behave.
After Boris's announcement, that the pedestrian phases of some lights will be slightly shortened, there was a certain amount of bleating from the usual suspects about the death of road user "hierarchy". But even the TfL boss, Peter Hendy, agrees that there are too many red lights in London (and this is not just his post-election Vicar of Bray journey from Ken supporter to Boris pal - he's been saying it since 2006).
My criticism of Boris's policy is that it doesn't go far enough. The changes proposed are modest - an average of two seconds' rephasing of each light, in a programme which is scheduled to take six years. Two seconds means almost nothing. Only five miles of guardrail is being removed this year, and only 16 miles in the next three years.
The more fundamental objection is that Boris's changes seem to be about slightly tweaking the existing approach, not overthrowing it. There is no word at all about reducing the absolute number of lights. In London we will, of course, never be able to abolish all traffic measures - or even most of them - but we can move significantly closer towards "naked streets" than Boris is currently proposing.
It is early days, though, and there are hopeful signs. Daniel Moylan, who helped deliver High Street Kensington, London's first (semi)-naked street, has recently been appointed deputy chair of TfL.
His task will be to convince Londoners that stripping out road clutter is in everyone's interest, pedestrians' as well as motorists'. If he does that, we could, on traffic, really see the light.
Reader views (6)
In Ashford in Kent, they have a new 'shared space' system where the same nonsense about pedestrians 'catching the drivers eye' was rolled out. How do you do this at night? How do you do this if you are partially sited or blind? How do you do this when there are dozens of cars and pedestrians all inter-mingled together? Would you let your children run around hoping that they will be 'catching the drivers eye' I do not wish to to drive, or should that be crawl down a pedestrian precinct and when I am a pedestrian, I want to move about in safety! When there is an accident it will be gradually turned around, so that it will always be the licence holders fault, as is the norm in other countries with these schemes. This is just another weapon in the socialist car hating agenda.
- Terry Hudson, Herne Bay, Kent, 13/03/2009 17:45
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Yes, re-phasing lights will bring marginal gains, but it amounts to fiddling while London fumes (in both senses). Apart from increasing congestion and all it entails, traffic controls put us at war with each other. The system has ruled our lives to universal detriment for too long. Left largely to our own devices, we could co-exist in peace if we were free of counterproductive traffic controls.
- Martin Cassini, London, 12/03/2009 19:06
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TFL closed one of our pedestrian crossings for a couple of weeks whilst it installed a second pedestrian stop button. We now have on the same side of the road two stop buttons about 7 feet apart!
- Dave, London England, 12/03/2009 18:06
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Naked streets are nothing new to England. I live in a 20 year old estate that has no white lines, no pedestrian crossings, no traffic lights and one roundabout. Most cars drive slowly and interact very well with both cyclists and pedestrians with almost no hostility. A model for all suburban areas at least.
- Andrew Rodgers, Swindon, UK, 12/03/2009 16:18
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As a cyclist who, it appears unusually, stops at red lights, my journey from Dalston to Westminster now takes up to 10 minutes longer with the number of traffic lights installed in the last 10 years - not to mention the numerous extra road humps.
- Patrick, Dalston, 12/03/2009 13:16
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Good article and sentiments. Anything which shows a red light to Red Ken's socialist-coercion one-way street is fine by me.
- St, London, 12/03/2009 12:55
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