Woonerven

Some of the first traffic calming measures were implemented in the early 1960's. One notable example is the Dutch Woonerven, a measure directed at calming traffic on residential streets. Residents of the Dutch city of Delft decided to transform their neighborhood streets into "woonerven," or "living yards."(2) The streets were redesigned to integrate them with the yards of adjoining residences. This provided the motorist with the illusion that they were driving among the residential yards, not on a separate thoroughfare. The illusion was accomplished by jutting parking spaces, sand boxes, gardens, and tables into the streets. Woonerven brought motorist speeds down under 10mph and successfully battled cut-through traffic and speeding vehicles in low-volume areas. Woonerven were not viable solutions for streets that required a higher volume of cars or long distances of speed control where such low speeds were not tolerable. The cost to create a neighborhood with woonerven was about 50 percent more than conventional street reconstruction. Woonerven work best on local access streets for short distances.

In 1976 the Dutch government officially endorsed the woonerven. The idea of the "living yard," or shared street spread over Europe, Japan, Israel, and Australia. In 1990, the Netherlands and Germany had 3,500 shared streets, Japan had 300, and Israel had 600. (5)

In the 1980s, the Dutch government went looking for the best solution to control traffic on neighborhood and troublesome streets. The Government investigated three approaches to controlling traffic:

1. Woonerven
2. Traffic calming treatments. (physical measures like speed humps)
3. Traffic diversion schemes. (street closures and one-way streets)

For neighborhood streets, traffic calming was judged the most cost effective and was endorsed by the Dutch government in 1983. Before this alternative became known widely as traffic calming, it took on a couple names like "stille veje" (silent road), "tempo 30," and 20-mph zones. (2)

Environmentally Adapted Through Roads

In the early 1980's Denmark investigated possible solutions to reduce the speed and/or the amount of through-traffic in small towns. The basic concept used traffic calming measures on arterial streets at the entrances to the town and highly traveled pedestrian areas within the town. The entrance treatments usually consisted of visual pre-warning signs or gateways to alert motorists that they were approaching a controlled area. Once in the town, chicanes, chokers, roundabouts, speed humps, and other traffic calming measures were employed. This procedure was termed "Environmentally Adapted Through Roads," and saw some good results. The speed of vehicles dropped, accidents declined, air quality improved, and the cost of employing the traffic calming measures was about one-third to one-fourth that of constructing a bypass. (2)

Verkehrsberuhigung

It was not until the late 1970's that the term traffic calming was devised by the Germans. Verkehrsberuhigung is a compound German word that means "traffic" and "a state of reassurance, comfort, or ease of mind."(6) The Germans recognized that calming traffic in neighborhoods moved traffic to other roads. An experiment to study the effects of area-wide traffic calming was conducted. The study used speed limit reduction, speed tables, pinch points, chicanes, the conversion of one-way streets to 2-way operation, the narrowing of roads, and the encouragement of alternative modes of travel. The overall results of the experiment were positive. The volume of vehicles in the test towns were unchanged, speeds were reduced, air pollution was reduced, noise was reduced, the frequency of accidents was unchanged, and the severity of accidents was reduced. These results encouraged cities in many countries to implement area-wide traffic calming measures. (2)

Britain

In 1963 the British produced one of the first reports, Traffic in Towns (7) that helped launch the modern traffic calming movement. The book stated that the growth of traffic impacted the quality of urban life. The book encouraged street closures and one-way streets as a part of neighborhood traffic management. Interestingly, it was not until the late 1980's that British law was modified to allow for vertical deflections in traffic calming, for example, the raised crosswalk. Since the 1980's much development and legislation has been established to allow for the expanding use of traffic calming in the United Kingdom.

Australia

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Australia used many of the ideas cited in Traffic in Towns, for example, employing techniques that altered the local street network by closing streets and creating one-way streets. These changes to the street network were developed to cut down on the amount of non-local traffic in the neighborhoods. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Australia recognized through their own experiences, British publications, and other European trends in neighborhood traffic management (NTM), that other effective measures existed and what was currently being done was not enough. The emphasis on NTM in Australia shifted to two different objectives:

1. The reduction of vehicle speed and
2. The creation of opportunities for streetscaping to change the appearance of the street.(6)

Most of Australia's NTM practice today consists of the reduction of vehicle speed. Some neighborhoods in Australia have had more than 20 years of experience with the use of physical traffic calming measures.

In 1990, Australia identified the need to define traffic calming. Until now, traffic calming was interpreted as a local community tool to calm traffic to some individuals, while others saw it as an wide-area plan for calming traffic. Australia eliminated the confusion by identifying three levels of traffic calming.(6)

At present, Australia is one of the leaders in traffic calming in the world. Australia has about 2,000 roundabouts, leading the way with the use of the modern roundabout for traffic calming and control of intersections.(2) Traffic calming has been integrated with Australia for over 20 years and they currently have very strong programs in place to continue the implementation of traffic calming.