I lived in Montana which has few traffic lights or stop signs in its' largest cities; Great Falls and Billings. True, those cities are around 80,000 population, but they've used basic rules of the road for longer than they've had cars and it works. When I was sent there in the USAF, they made sure everyone knew and understood what was expected of drivers.

Last time I was there, about two years ago, it was much the same. The only roads controlled by lights are four lanes.

What can I say? ..let's see how it works!

Seems utterly pragmatic to me, but then again, I fear that it will not scale up to a larger city or higher speeds.....

Every now and again we have a major traffic light failure here in Calgary (about a million here now) after a bit of time, people seem to get used to it and the overall traffic flow is not much worse than with the light.....


Dennis

I was driving through a fairly heavily trafficked road in Charlotte - came on a dead stop light - dead, no flashing signal, whatever. People would get there, and just sit there stunned, without being told what to do, they'd sit. I looked around at the other drivers, decided on a time, and moved through.

IF driver's are alert, and are used to making decisions, it works, and Europe's drivers are generaly more alert, and faster acting.

Socialism or not, I like the boobie idea. :D

it's quite simple really
through most of Europe if not all of Europe , the following applies

in order of importance

cop instructions
traffic lights
signs
right of way to those coming from the right


so on a normal intersection
if there is no cop, look at the lights
of the lights are out, check for signs ( there wouldn't be any at an intersection that normally has lights)
no cop, no lights,no signs, right of way to those coming from the right... if there's somebody at all 4 ends of the intersection , then the first one to move pretty much wins and breaks the status quo.. but in any case , it's doable if everybody shows a bit of courtesy to the others on the road

Well said.