What's the best way to make a dangerous intersection safer for cars, bicycles and pedestrians alike and still maintain traffic flow?

In the U.S.A. it traditionally means traffic engineers laying on more traffic signals and turn lanes, posting more road signs and painting even more lane markings and directional arrows.

But in socialist Europe they're using a radical, less regulatory and shockingly counterintuitive way to make their roads and intersections safer -- they make them even more dangerous.

More than a dozen towns have switched to "Shared Space," a traffic-management technique that reduces accidents and eases congestion by stripping streets and crossroads of all government traffic controls.

Shared Space sounds scary and suspiciously anti-automobile to most red-blooded Americans and, at first blush, it seems to reinforce the notion that all Europeans are totally nuts.

But for the Dutch town of Drachten -- which sought a way to make its roadways equally friendly to those in cars, on bicycles or on foot -- Shared Space has been a success.

Several years ago the busy burg of 40,000 removed all of its traffic controls. Today a major intersection that handles 20,000 cars and thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians a day has no traffic lights, no speed limit signs, no directional markers, no curbs and no sidewalks.

The intersection has been redesigned into a big, open, traffic circle. Within that circle's seemingly chaotic flow, it's almost impossible to tell where cars and people belong -- which is exactly what Shared Space inventor Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman intended.

Monderman made the intersection seem as confusing, ambiguous and dangerous as possible, so that users would be forced to slow down, gauge each other's intentions, treat one another as equals and use eye contact to sort themselves out as they negotiated the traffic roundabout. Continued...