Dri­ving in Cir­cles – Think­ing in Cir­cles?

Thim­phu – the only cap­i­tal city in the world with­out traf­fic lights! It’s fes­ti­val sea­son, hol­i­day time, a state of excep­tion for the locals, and the tourist sea­son at its peak. No horns — only when tru­ly nec­es­sary — and this in a coun­try neigh­bour­ing India! We stand, intrigued, at the famous round­about in the heart of Thim­phu, watch­ing the scene unfold.

Many years ago we wrote about the traf­fic exper­i­ments in the Nether­lands — remove the traf­fic lights, restore per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty — and the “aston­ish­ing” find­ing: few­er acci­dents, while con­sid­er­a­tion and atten­tive­ness both rose sharply at the same time. Today we know these approach­es have proven them­selves, and “shared space” as a con­cept con­tin­ues to be refined and put into prac­tice. Com­ple­ment­ed by AI and mod­ern sen­sor tech­nol­o­gy, we’ve been fol­low­ing its progress for years. The sim­ple under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples: equal stand­ing for all road users; eye con­tact, with road users com­mu­ni­cat­ing through glances and mutu­al con­sid­er­a­tion; and a change in behav­iour — mak­ing traf­fic more cau­tious and more flu­id by rely­ing on less arti­fi­cial safe­ty.

Back to our junc­tion: with an ele­gant sweep of the hand, the traf­fic mar­shal watch­es over and directs the scene. There’s no trace of hur­ry, and then sud­den­ly a sec­ond mar­shal appears beside the island and, quite gen­tly, push­es a traf­fic cone into the mid­dle of the road — sure enough, a small queue has built up in the exit lane where all the taxis line up, and it’s about to spill into the round­about! No — not this time: thanks to this small mea­sure, the mat­ter is resolved with­in sec­onds, and the cone is already gone again. With­out a word, with noth­ing more than a brief exchange of glances and a well-prac­tised under­stand­ing, the col­lab­o­ra­tion sort­ed itself out and the traf­fic sit­u­a­tion was under con­trol!

It looks like traf­fic chaos, yet nobody notices — thanks to every­one involved com­mit­ting to the task togeth­er and read­ing the sit­u­a­tion flex­i­bly, as it demands. Some­times it’s the “eye”-moments — a glance exchanged at just the right instant — that bring col­lab­o­ra­tion into flow!