The International Herald Tribune has a piece about road design. It's about Hans Monderman, a dutch traffic engineer who advocates for virtually naked cities, "stripped of all lights, signs and road markings, but there was no division between road and sidewalk. It was, basically, a bare brick square".

He made his first nervous foray into shared space in a small village whose residents were upset at its being used as a daily thoroughfare for 6,000 speeding cars. When he took away the signs, lights and sidewalks, people drove more carefully. Within two weeks, speeds on the road had dropped by more than half. In fact, he said, there has never been a fatal accident on any of his roads. Several early studies bear out his contention that shared spaces are safer. In England, the district of Wiltshire found that removing the center line from a stretch of road reduced drivers' speed without any increase in accidents.

Of course, this is of interest since I'm into research about how people makes sens of physical space to do stuff together. The point is that the design of the streets should be based on a social model. You can find more about it here. This shared space looks like: