Jonathan Coppage writing for New Urbs in The American Conservative:
The Dutch, on the other hand, also applied Forgiving Highways to their highways, and adopted many of the same technology and education campaigns, but they took a very different approach to their built-up areas. Suburbs and cities were not treated as freeways, wide open roads to be blasted down with obstacles set at a safe distance. Instead, they created “self-explaining streets.” By accommodating all modes of transportation on their streets, not just the automobile, and by subtly signaling that cars would be sharing their space with pedestrians and bicycles, and most of all by shrinking the lanes and lines of sight available to their drivers, the Dutch put drivers in a position to slow themselves by common sense. And their fatalities have fallen from 3,200 in 1975 to 800 in 2008. Having started with a traffic fatality rate 20 percent higher than the United States, the Dutch presently enjoy a rate 60 percent lower. In the delightfully perverse phrase of “shared space” pioneer Hans Monderman (also Dutch), in order to make streets safe, you must first make them dangerous.
Counterintuitive but sensible.