This post probably doesn’t quite work, but at At War With The Motorist I continue the thread on shared space by considering the mechanism by which it works: risk compensation — the idea that when traffic management is ripped out, road users will perceive the road to be more risky and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Ignoring the first rule of analogies — that they must refer to something that is easier to understand and more everyday than the complex or specialist phenomenon one is attempting to explain — I use evolutionary strategies to explain why shared space might destroy its own effectiveness by becoming more common. Read it here.
