Hans Monderman: Traffic engineer who stripped roads of signs, marking and traffic lights to create a ‘shared space' for cars and pedestrians

Hans Monderman pioneered the concept of the “naked street” by removing all the things that were supposed to make it safe for the pedestrian - traffic lights, railings, kerbs and road markings. He thereby created a completely open and even surface on which motorists and pedestrians “negotiated” with each other by eye contact.

Monderman worked tirelessly to prove that such roads are safer and, more than 25 years after his first experiment in the Netherlands, streets all over the world are being redesigned to the Monderman “shared space” model. He passionately believed that segregating cars and pedestrians was wrong and an imposition from the state. Instead, he claimed a natural interaction between the driver and the pedestrian would create a more civilised environment.

His maxim was: “If you treat drivers like idiots, they act as idiots. Never treat anyone in the public realm as an idiot, always assume they have intelligence.”

To prove his point, Monderman was known for boldly walking out on to his naked streets and junctions, turning his back on the moving traffic and walking to the other side to show that drivers would not run him over.

Streets all over the UK are now being stripped of traffic lights, kerbs and other street furniture deemed to be lulling motorists into a false sense of security. New schemes using his ideas include Kensington High Street and Exhibition Road in London and Brighton New Road. There are more than 40 “shared space” streets under development in Britain.

But it was not always thus. Monderman's radical ideas saw him initially vilified as a dangerous maverick by his fellow engineers and he had to overcome the deeply ingrained view of road safety engineering that has held sway since the seminal 1963 Buchanan Report on Traffic in Towns. Since then, British road safety manuals have been crammed with directives on traffic lights, barriers and road markings.

The Department for Transport's Design for Streets manual was recently rewritten to encourage local authorities to redesign on shared space principles and 12 UK councils have pledged wholesale redesign of their streets. In his last UK interview with New Civil Engineer magazine in November, Monderman hailed the “amazing progress” of shared space schemes in Britain.

Even so, his ideas still drew strong opposition and Guide Dogs for the Blind was the latest group to condemn shared space. The charity recently claimed that blind and partially sighted people would be “socially excluded” because they can't make eye contact with drivers and their guide dogs are trained to use kerbs.

Johannes Ieve Monderman was born in the town of Leeuwarden in the province of Friesland in 1945. As a child he had a reputation as a “boy who fixed things” and neighbours would ask him to repair their radios or telephones. His early knack for problem solving and interest in geology led him to train as a civil engineer. Once qualified and employed as a municipal engineer, designing roads in Friesland, he quickly became interested in road accident investigation. His interest developed further when he became a driving instructor in his spare time. His experience observing at close quarters how drivers read roads informed his later work.

Road safety became an important political issue in the Netherlands after a spate of fatal road accidents involving children in the late 1970s. As a result, the Netherlands Government appointed regional road safety investigators throughout the country. In 1982 Monderman was appointed as an investigator for Friesland.

Soon after starting in the role, sudden budget cuts led to the scrapping of planned traffic-calming measures in the village of Oudehaske, where two children had been killed in road accidents. Monderman suddenly hit upon the idea of stripping out all the remaining highway signs and furniture to create a plain, even surface. To his astonishment he found that drivers cut their speeds by an average of 40 per cent when driving through the village. It was a defining discovery and further experimentation confirmed that naked streets cut speeds far more than speed humps because they increased drivers' awareness of their surroundings and thus caused them to slow down. Monderman developed his approach and has since put in place more than 100 shared space schemes in his native Friesland, and in Groningen and Drenthe provinces.

But it was not until 1992 that the first big urban application of shared space was completed at the town of Makkinga, where every trace of road signs, markings and signals was removed. Monderman's designs went beyond merely stripping out highway measures. The skill was in combining engineering with human psychology and demonstrating an appreciation of a place and how people would read it.

Monderman was virtually unknown outside Friesland until recent years when the public realm, and street design in particular, moved rapidly up the political agenda. In the UK, for example, newly created bodies such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) began to champion Monderman's work. Last year the Conservative Party's transport spokesman backed the expansion of shared space in Britain.

There was a new hunger for innovative ideas about public space and road safety, and in 2001 articles on Monderman in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune generated a surge of media interest. It was soon after this that his biggest urban schemes, such as the La Weiplein junction in Drachten, were completed.

A European Union research project into shared space was launched in 2003 and naked streets began to appear in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland. The concept has since spread to the USA, Canada, Russia, South Africa, Australia, Japan and Brazil.

Mayors, policymakers and journalists from all over the world started to converge on Friesland, and Monderman spent much of his time in recent years patiently conducting them around his shared space projects.

Monderman was a gentle soul who never broke out of the mould of the quiet and unassuming traffic engineer.Thick-set and bearded with a placid face, Monderman was a man on whom the mantle of a world-famous “shared space guru” never sat comfortably. It was his persistence and patience in implementing shared space schemes in the Netherlands over three decades that finally broke the fierce resistance to his ideas, rather than any obvious charisma.

Nor was he a typical road safety campaigner; he was a “suit and tie man” who loved cars and insisted that the car was part of the solution and not the problem.

And unlike many of the other leading lights of road safety, Monderman was not an academic or a political lobbyist but remained a practising engineer who continued to add to his vast technical knowledge in road design.

The UK's leading shared space consultant, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, wrote of him: “What is so remarkable about the man is that he has achieved such a transformation of traffic engineering (not a profession famed for its profound thinking and original analysis) through remarkable persistence, patience and professional commitment.”

Monderman's wife, Tineke, and two sons survive him.
Hans Monderman, civil engineer and road safety expert, was born on November 19, 1945. He died of prostate cancer on January 7, 2008, aged 62

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The Times