"A new school of traffic design says we should get rid of stop signs and red lights and let cars, bikes and people mingle together. It sounds insane, but it works."
This works very well for the area in front of my apartment. There's a sidewalk on one side, but the other is café terraces, trees, and fountains, with no clear demarcation from the roadway. There are speed bumps and "meeting place" signs on the main entrances to the mixed-use zone, but the side streets don't have such obvious markings. Generally people wind up driving more slowly than the posted 20 kph.
The city seems to have been happy with the result as well; this year they converted the road around the way in the same manner, with perhaps a bit more priority to pedestrians and café loungers and a little less to vehicles.
Of course, it must be admitted that this is (a) on the edge of the old town (my balcony is almost directly over where the city walls used to be), which already had very little vehicular traffic, and (b) in a country where pedestrians normally have the right-of-way. If I ever go back to the States, I'd probably be dead within the month, having picked up the habit of walking in front of moving cars without a second thought.
-Dave
