In a nondescript business park on the edge of an obscure Dutch town, a small group of revolutionaries is plotting to change the world. The security agencies have not yet investigated, but the goings-on might be of some interest to the traffic cops.

The group is known as the Shared Space Institute, which aims to overthrow a century’s worth of experience about how people coexist with the car. “This is not just about what we do in the street, but about how we live together,” says Sabine Lutz, the institute’s development officer.

Shared Space spreads the gospel according to Hans Monderman, a former driving instructor and road safety officer who died suddenly, aged 62, early last year, just when his ideas were gaining international traction. Monderman brought a kind of William Morris/kibbutznik/hey-man-let-it-all-hang-out philosophy to the normally staid business of traffic planning. His theory was that if you stop telling everyone what to do all the time, they will learn to do the right thing instinctively.

In practice, this means ending the segregation that governs urban streets in the developed world – taken to extremes in British cities, where miles of steel fences separate pavement and road, and Singapore, where jaywalkers can be jailed. If the road belonged to everyone, Monderman believed, then motorists would learn to slow down and navigate their way safely through the throng of cyclists, pedestrians, whoever.

And there are some indications that he was right. Monderman schemes are now in effect across the world including about 40 in Britain, with Kensington having the best-known and Ashford in Kent the most elaborate. The Ashford scheme was greeted with a volley of abuse from the auto-extremist Jeremy Clarkson in The Sun: “Someone is going to be killed, you idiots.” Monderman anticipated that long ago: “If you treat drivers like idiots, they act as idiots,” he said. And from across the board come reports that accident rates have fallen.

Monderman tested this out in Drachten when a roundabout was rebuilt to his specifications: his party piece was to walk backwards across the road with his eyes shut, which itself might be regarded as idiocy. But he died of natural causes; he was not run over.

If Shared Space conquers the world, then the world may flock to Drachten (pop: 45,000) in Friesland, a northern province known for cattle and not much else. The city boomed briefly in the 1950s, thanks to a Philips factory, and has a hideous town centre to show for it.

Monderman was in charge of provincial safety policy; Shared Space is based here; and at a junction known as De Kaden, cars, pedestrians and cyclists meet each other without traffic lights and with a minimum of rules, except natural Dutch courtesy. This was his first big experiment and, after eight years, it has not produced a major accident.

Watching De Kaden is like watching a cartoon. “My God!” you think about once a minute. “That car’s going to hit that cyclist!” And then miraculously it doesn’t. In any case, even if something did happen, it would happen at a slow enough speed not to be too serious. This is not to be confused with more traditional methods of control. “The aim is to create a space for the people, not for the traffic,” said the institute’s urban planner, Sjoerd Nota. “It’s a totally different approach to speed bumps and traffic calming.”

His colleague Sabine Lutz took me to see another showpiece scheme, in Haren, a suburb of nearby Groningen. Here a shopping street has been Mondermanised: wide brick pavements and trees go in, traffic signs come out. Shoppers stroll across the street, apparently contentedly. And you can see the benefits – at a once-frantic junction there is now a pavement café, which would have been unthinkable before.

It all looks really nice, and so I asked a few locals what they thought. To Sabine’s discomfiture, they told me. “OK, nothing has happened, but it’s very dangerous,” said Guus Ennes, the corner tobacconist. “There is a lot of anger.” He was right: “It was better in the old way. It was clearer for everyone,” said Greta Siekmans in the pharmacy. Enid Hahn, out shopping, didn’t like it either: “For my grandchildren, it’s terrible. They don’t know where to go.”

When the score reached 8-0 to the antis, I took pity on Sabine and gave up. The pattern was unmistakable: the planners had lost touch with the public. Opinion was more balanced in Drachten. William Ebbes was visiting from the smaller town of Oosterwolde, which has its own scheme: “It works excellently where we live, and also I think here, too. You are forced to be careful, so you take a good look.”

But one sensed widespread confusion. Self-reliance is out of fashion in the west. Adults are so used to being treated like children, they no longer have the confidence to make a choice. They miss the little green man. Should I stay or should I go?

And Enid Hahn gave voice to a very real problem. In agreeable places like Haren, responsible parents might well let a nine-year-old walk to school or the sweet shop if they were confident the child knew exactly how to behave when crossing the road. But if the parents themselves are not confident …

You might also think that an idea which would work in the polite, rational Netherlands would not be suitable for export to more aggressive societies. But actually there is a very Dutch problem here. The streets in, for instance, Amsterdam are the most segregated in the world. To cross a main road, you may have to negotiate, after stepping off the pavement, a cycle lane, a parking lane, a traffic lane and a tram line – just to get halfway, before repeating the cycle in reverse. Make a mistake and loiter on the cycle lane and you are in far more danger than on the runway at Schiphol. The cyclists fought for decades to win their network of dedicated routes and they don’t want to share with anyone.

Already, the purity of Monderman’s ideal is being lost. There are zebra crossings at De Kaden, by public demand, although they should be unnecessary. The roundabout where Monderman walked backwards has now been modified and looks, to the naked eye, like any other roundabout.

He was definitely on to something. Banning cars from towns is often impractical, even counter-productive: cars and people have to live together. But all the regulations are weakening everyone’s sense of responsibility. Motorists go as fast as they are allowed, worrying about speed cameras, instead of reacting to the situation as it exists. This is not just a problem of town centres. Thousands of villages across Europe need to find a solution to traffic to reclaim their vitality. I know country roads that would be far safer if the white lines were removed. And wouldn’t it be fantastic if kids could again play in residential streets?

Even the Dutch don’t seem able to get their heads round this. Sjoerd Nota explained: “People want us to put up signs saying, ‘Be careful, shared space’. Hans wouldn’t have liked this. He wanted the environment itself to tell the story.”

matthew.engel@ft.com
Matthew Engel’s dispatch appears fortnightly