Traffic calming

Traffic calming is a calque (literal translation) of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Traffic engineers refer to three "E's" when discussing traffic calming: engineering, (community) education, and (police) enforcement. Some UK and Irish "traffic calming" schemes, particularly involving road narrowings, are viewed as extremely hostile and have been implicated directly in death and injury to cyclists and pedestrians. The town of Hilden in Germany has achieved a rate of 24% of trips being on two wheels, mainly via traffic calming and the use of 30 km/h or 20 mph zones. In 1999, the Netherlands had over 6000 woonerven where cyclists have legal priority over cars and where a motorised "walking speed" limit applies. The following measures are emerging as an effective alternative with several advantages: Narrowing traffic lanes makes slower speeds seem more natural.