Years ago I was at Seven Corners (where route 7 crosses route 50 and Wilson Blvd.) after a thunderstorm had knocked out power.  Traffic was flowing smoothly as each car stopped until it was his/her turn.

What VDOT and local jurisdictions can do is ramp up investment in smart lights.  To see one in action, if you are in Fairfax go to the intersection of Monument Dr. and Government Pkwy, i.e., the intersection one block off Lee Highway that is adjacent to the Wegman's supermarket.  If the traffic clears in one direction, the light turns red really fast, and the opposite side gets the green.  If a car is in the turn lane, it gets an arrow, but it disappears as soon as the car turns.  

We had lights like this all over the suburbs in Minnesota.  I don't think they can be used with full effectiveness at rush hour, but for middle of the day traffic they're great.  There are so many places in western Fairfax where you wait and wait while there is no or little cross traffic.  These are not merely light systems that sense if a car is in a turn lane, but they can "see" how many cars are in the lane.  (They seem to use electric eyes mounted on top of the lighting system rather than lane pressure devices.)

If anyone knows more about these types of lights, it would be nice to know more about them.

The timing of lights on main roads is spotty at best.

I was in East Germany last October and remember walking somewhere on a Sunday afternoon and looking all around for traffic signals so I would know we to walk. I couldn't find any so I just looked around and walked across the street when no one was coming. Someone told me they only had a few traffic lights in the city.

I can't tell how peaceful I felt about this, almost like I had returned to the way things should be. Why the lack of traffic lights would make me feel peaceful, I don't know, but it is true. Statistics show that in this area accidents have not increased as a result of this change.

I'm not sure this would work in DC though where there is a lot of agressive driving, but I think there are areas where it could work.

At Tysons Corner, if the sidewalks were torn up and traffic regulations abandoned, and considering NOVA drivers' lack of road courtesy, what youd have is the condition called "thinning the herd."  Population Darwinism!  As for street signs, in VA you can barely see or read them because of their placement and coloring.  They are no factor.

This is a Dutch concept known as a "woonerf." (It means "street for living.")

In heavily-trafficked areas where cars will always move slowly and multiple modes of transportation come together (bicyclists, pedestrians, mass transit, scooters, cars, etc.), it seems that it works better if they self-regulate. Woonerven came into being in The Netherlands in the '60s and '70s, and the idea is to have a common space shared by all of these types of transit. Obstacles are placed in the street (planters, trees, parking spaces, etc.) to prevent traffic from moving quickly. This also turns pedestrians into the primary users of the space, making vehicles the intruders. Cars seldom exceed 10mph in woonerven.

Holland and Denmark have converted 6,500 brief stretches of road into woonerven. Traffic fatality rates have dropped to nothing. Intersections were a few annual fatalities were routine haven't seen a single death. That's a) because automobile drivers cannot drive through quickly because they're so varying and b) because 20mph is the cap of speed at which pedestrians can avoid serious injury when being struck by a car.

Happily, 18.5mph is the speed at which urban traffic flows best, many studies have shown. Coincidentally, this is also a speed at which there's no need for traffic control systems.

We have woonerf-like traffic patterns (and self-regulating patterns, as in the article) throughout the world now. Look at rush hour on Paris' Avenue de la Grande Armee: it's got four lanes of traffic at noon on a Sunday, but come rush hour people up and decide that maybe six is better. Look at Beijing during rush hour -- hordes of bicyclists mingling with packed autos, scooters weaving through the chaos.

England's got them, too. They call them "home zones." They're in a few dozen places now. They can't be more than a third of a mile long, and can't be used by more than 100 vehicles per hour. More traffic means that it's just not a viable home zone.

For more on this see Linda Baker's 2004 article for Salon, Anthony Flint's 2004 Boston Globe article, and walkinginfo.org's case study on Asheville's implementation of a woonerf on Wall Street, downtown.