Sing it with me, folks…
You 👏 can’t 👏 reduce 👏 the 👏 speed 👏 limit 👏 without 👏 also 👏 changing 👏 the 👏 street 👏 geometry! IT DOESN’T FUCKING WORK!
People don’t give a shit about the what the speed limit sign says; they drive at the maximum speed at which they feel safe and comfortable based on the lane width, curve sharpness, etc. If you want to slow people down, you HAVE TO physically change the road – narrow it, add chicanes, etc. – to make it “feel” less safe. It’s not fucking optional!
(Source: my background in traffic engineering.)
To be clear, I’m not saying that the goal of reducing speeds is bad. I’m just saying that attempting to do so on the cheap by changing the rules instead of the built environment itself accomplishes nothing but to generate more lawbreaking. Well, that and potentially making the road even less safe than it was before because having a wider mix of speeds is even worse than having everybody at a uniformly too-high speed.
Absolutely right. My town just made every road 25mph. Great. Unfortunately nobody gives a fuck. The road out in front of my house just got repaved. It’s beautiful. I love it. Pulling in and out of my driveway has never been better. People also blast down it, mainly because I think they perceive speed differently on a nice smooth tarmac versus what was a cratered surface rivaling the moon. My suggestion to my neighbors is we just keep cars parked on the street all the time. If folks in opposing directions need to stick to a side to let others pass, it will naturally cause them to move more slowly.
Edit - Forgot to add, I listen to traffic engineers testify pretty regularly and consistently get mistreated, so I just want you to know that I appreciate what you’re saying and what you do.
My house is on a residential 25mph street with a slight S curve. There was a car parked at the end of the curve and a reckless driver managed to plow into it and flip their car. It was the wildest thing I’ve ever seen. You would expect something like this on an interstate highway, not a tree lined street with little kids playing.
Step 1: reduce speed limit
Step 2: always have speed trap in place
Step 3: profitFor some countries (looking at you, USA) it would have an additional benefit. Cops should do their actual job, not lurk in some corner hoping to catch someone speeding. That’s something easily done automatically, so why waste man power for this shit…
Google maps tells me when there’s a speed trap.
And do you slow down? If so, we just need stupid cheap speed cameras and deploy them fucking everywhere
Speed cameras would be my suggestion to reduce speeding as a more immediate, but ultimately a Band-Aid solution.
I see you’ve been to Australia.
I largely agree with you, but I also recently saw this article: https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/07/26/inventive-or-stupid-french-village-disorients-drivers-with-crisscrossed-white-lines
That seems more like an “and” than a “but,” since it’s a physical change to the road that makes it feel less safe. Anyway, nice find! I like how inventive and relatively inexpensive it is.
My apologies. English is not my first language. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
There is a lot a criticism in the article, but not statement on if it worked or not.
Speeds should be set using the 85th percentile rule: the speed limit is whatever speed the 85th percentile driver goes.
The thing, though, is we should work backwards from figuring out a desired speed for pedestrian + cyclist safety and then build a road with the desired 85th percentile speed.
Too often, it’s done exactly backwards.
there was a less obnoxious way to say this. the people you are condescending to are not even here.
It’s easy, just require speed governors in cars.
Where I live, they’re required in e scooters and e bikes, which are far less dangerous than cars
We have different definitely of “easy”
E-scooters and e-bikes don’t have speed limits that vary by street. In order to implement a governor capable of limiting a car to a 20 mph speed in certain areas while still allowing it to run at highway speeds in others, you’d need either a computer vision system to read the speed limit signs or a GPS paired with a perfectly complete and up-to-date speed limit geodatabase, and you’d need to give either such fallible computerized system control over the throttle (which could be a safety hazard in and of itself, for multiple reasons).
The difference between a e-bike governor and a car governor that can be set to something lower than 70 mph is like this.
Then make nation-wide limit at 20 units of imperialism per hour
Found the rational one!
Just have a 20 mph limit in the city, and no speed limit outside the city. This would also require moving all the highways outside the city, but I think that would be an improvement.
your background in traffic engineering included learning how much these modifications cost.
seems like if we can’t have your ideal we get nothing.
yeah, thanks, nope. but thanks for the ovation.
You seem to be under the impression that changing the speed limit sign is “better than nothing.”
It’s not.
It is, in fact, worse than nothing because having half the drivers comply with the lower speed limit and having half not creates a mix of speeds that’s even more dangerous than if everybody just drove at the same higher speed.
I’m dubious and don’t care enough to take the time. whatever mr traffic engineer, I guess we just can’t have nice communities because it’s even worse to TRY.
do you have any idea how pathetic it sounds? like a cult of apathy, doing anything is GOING TO COST MONEY genius… and even if it doesn’t work perfectly, it’s still better to try than throw your hands up in the air and accept dead pedestrians all the time.
you do you tho.
Stupid science. What does it know?
oh now they’re scientists? even though they’ve referenced no facts, zero studies, but hey, let’s just make shit up ffs
I can’t decide which is more pitiful - him lying about being a traffic expert, or your blind assumption that he’s RIGHT because he’s lied about being a traffic expert.
goddamn, what a huge bucket of dumb.
I think the main problem here is for folks forced to drive every day in the dervish of death that is rush hour.
If you can’t afford to live near where you work (as is often the case in the UK), and you’re already looking at a 1 hour commute both ways, current public transport isn’t an option. You can either give up on sleep, or you will have to drive.
A lot of these changes are coming in the wrong order - first you improve public transport, create affordable housing near city centers, and drastically reduce the price (and let’s be frank, increase the quality of) public transport, and THEN you hit car users to push them on to these options. In the current order, they just introduce further hardship to folks who already have a bad time.
A lot of these changes are coming in the wrong order - first you improve public transport, create affordable housing near city centers, and drastically reduce the price (and let’s be frank, increase the quality of) public transport, and THEN you hit car users to push them on to these options. In the current order, they just introduce further hardship to folks who already have a bad time.
It might be a little different in the UK, but in North America step #1 needs to be “first you abolish the low-density zoning restrictions that displace almost everybody far away from the city center to begin with.” It’s not just that walkable housing isn’t affordable; it’s that it’s not even allowed by law to exist.
There is another substantial difference. In Europe you have private spaces to park your car and then roughly as many public parking spots as there are cars. In the US you have about 8 times as many public parking spots as cars exist. The amount of concrete wastelands just for potential cars is incredible.
You could basically scrap ¾ of your parking spaces to create walkable areas with small shops beside the big malls or oversized markets, then do some public transport to those areas (or still drive by car there), just to establich the idea of walking while shopping.
That’s no replacement for getting rid of zoning regulations but a realistic start, where changing the zoning (even when the regulation vanish) would need a generation or more to change.
Yeah, the current approach globally - at least it seems to be the same in Germany - is to make the “experience”, if you want to call it that, for car users worse to the point that it’s worse than public transport in order to force people onto it. There are some minor improvements being made to public transport, but it’s of course a lot faster to put up signs for a speedlimit everywhere or even blocking access to certain roads completely than to increase the capacity of a rail network. And as you said, this hits the already disadvantaged parts of the population more, since they more often than not have manual labor type job that requires going into the “office” everyday, that are living further from work, …
That’s not some “approach” but a symptom of conservatives fighting change tooth and nails. And it’s always easier to destroy something. So while one side is trying to improve public transport and create proper bike infrastructure at the same time, the other side is sabotaging.
Plus the car centric model was helped along by sabotaging public transport, so it shouldn’t be a surprise if doing the reverse is the way to get back.
Disadvantaged parts of population usually don’t have cars. For example in Moscow total amout of cars is about 20% of population, in regions it’s even less.
Missed one - you actively encourage mobile working so you have less people moving around in total.
I agree here, a larger push towards remote working would definitely help, though such a move would likely come at the expense of privacy (teams is already a privacy nightmare as it is, with wider home work adoption no doubt Microsoft would implement more “features for employers”).
Given that we know going over the speed limit raises your collision rate, meaning setting the speed limit so low every driver will go over it is genuinely dangerous, do we have any studies supporting the claim that reducing the speed limit reduces the collision rate overall? I couldn’t find one, but it’s a surprisingly challenging search - I easily found studies confirming that collision lethality scales with speed, but that’s not my question.
Purely anecdotally, the vast majority of my collisions have been at very low speeds - in parking lots.
Purely anecdotally, the vast majority of my collisions have been at very low speeds - in parking lots.
The fact that you talk like you have enough samples to make that inference worries me.
Sounds like this guy needs to stop driving into parked cars.
He only hits people in the lots, not cars. So it’s fine.
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Why will every driver go over 20mph/30kph? Are they incapable of maintaining that speed? All school and community zones in my country are 30kph; are we wasting our time with those?
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I’m a vision zero proponent, so I don’t care about the number of collisions; I care about the number of fatal collisions first, serious injuries second, minor injuries third. So even if 20 mph maintains, or even increases collisions; so long as it reduces casualties, it’s positive. Bumpers are replaceable; people are not. The AAA document you link even says a 10% reduction in mean speed reduces fatal crashes by ~34% in the executive summary.
Regarding the first point, drivers naturally trend towards the speed they “feel” is right. Also many modern cars practically idle faster than 20 once you get rolling.
Change the actual road to slow people down and reduce accidents.
I agree, but you are making excuses for bad driving. It’s still their fault that they drive too fast.
Not excusing shit, I’m describing human behavior. Humans literally drift to the speed they think is right, by feel.
Don’t assume intent.
But similarly, human behavior can be trained. We aren’t NPCs. These bad drivers could be taught to drive at a safe speed regardless of the width of the street, through stricter education and enforcement. Pedestrians/cyclists/homes/businesses around the street -> drive slow, that should be an instinct.
I said “change the actual road”
Enforcement doesn’t work for what I’m describing, without conscious effort, humans drift to the speed they think they need. Always. So whenever you try to policy it, you are asking folks to go against their nature.
Change the shape / characteristics of the road to change the speed people drive it.
As I said, I completely agree that changing the shape of the road is an important component of this solution.
Yes, I am asking the operators of deadly heavy machinery to put in a small amount of conscious effort to keep people safe. Why is that an impossible request?
- I did not make this claim, and so I do not choose to defend it.
No one in my state complies with the speed limits because they’re ridiculously low for the design of the road. You have a road built to handle 90mph but you tell people to go 30mph? Yeah that ain’t happening
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My main concern with this is that what you’re doing is desensitising people from the speed limit.
I’m from a country that has arbitrarily defined speed limits and VERY low compliance rates compared to the UK (if you’ve ever been to Italy for example you know what I’m talking about). The nice thing here is that because the vast majority of roads have a speed limit that ‘feels’ appropriate (ie the road is designed for its speed limit), the amount of speeding I see here is negligible compared to what I was used to.
And generally here when the limit changes people comply to it because you can trust there’s usually a good reason.
There’s roads near me that are arbitrarily set to 30 (no pedestrian walkways, no side roads, but it passes near the back of houses and I assume they successfully petitioned the local authority to change it to 30), and traffic flow there is usually 40-45. I’ve never seen an accident there.
We have a poorly designed intersection not too far away and there’s always accidents there to the point that there’s now a consultation to fix it.
If this rule came to England, both these roads would be turned to 20, and that won’t really be solving anything. In the first example I assume locals will still be driving 40, and it will create unnecessary overtaking because the road is wide and the visibility is good so it’s not necessarily unsafe. But you’ve gone from a safe 40 road to risking head-on collisions pointlessly.
Tons of European cities already set-up speed-limit to 30 km/h. It’s not just large cities, I’ve seen villaged limited at 30 too.
it’s basically less nuisance for the residentsI envy you. My city is still at federal maximum of 60 km/h. I know only one city in Belgorod oblast that has 40 km/h.
Fine where alternatives are available. But this also would slow down busses, right?
We have this speed limit in the Netherlands, mostly in areas with housing. It doesn’t really affect busses because they stay on the bigger roads that are 50 kmh (about 31 mph). In my opinion it’s fine to drive 20 mph on the more local roads, as long as there are collector roads where you can go a bit faster.
Why not figure out what distance it takes to get going say 30MPH and install speed bumps at those intervals? They hurt if you go over them to fast so its a disincentive to do so.
speed bumps are garbage for speed control, you need to make the cars weave with alternating bollards or curbs. Traffic circles and roundabouts use this method to reduce dangerous collisions.
For small streets with no lane markings: bollards placed on both sides so cars have to stop to let other cars through.
For large streets - lanes that weave near pedestrian crossings with curbs or jersey barriers force drivers to slow down and turn work best.
Traffic calming has plenty of options outside speed bumps.
They let you buy an oversized SUV to bypass that.
This is great, and with electric vehicles being more and more common it should be super easy to drive slow
One of the problems is that a lot of cars have trouble driving at that speed. It’s really difficult to get them to remain at a constant speed under 25 mph or so, which can end up being extremely frustrating for the driver and encourages them to go faster than the speed limit. I realize this is a car design problem, but it’s still a problem at present until that is fixed.
Is this a European car thing or a driver skill issue? As an American I’ve never had a problem maintaining slow speeds in any vehicle I’ve driven - manual or automatic.
Edit: I am starting to realize that some drivers are startlingly dependent on cruise control to maintain a target speed.
100% skill issue. @FlyingSquid was self-reporting his incompetence.
I’m so confused by the number of people in these comments who apparently can’t maintain speed without cruise control.
This is almost certainly not a European thing. A lot of people here still drive manually and just idling in 1st gear gives you a steady 7-10km/h… or “walking speed” as used in really dense and mostly pedestrian areas cars are still allowed to use. Idling in 3rd gear is around 30km/h (~19mph).
As an American, I sure have. Including my current Prius which doesn’t drive consistently between about 5 and 25 mph. And that was true of my previous Honda Civic as well.
Are these newer models or in poor condition or something? I’ve driven well maintained older Prius, Civic, and Accord vehicles without these issues and I LOVED how the Civic handled all around.
2006 Civic traded in for a 2016 Prius. Maybe you’re better at handling a car than other people, but my subdivision is 20 mph the whole way through and I have never myself or been behind anyone who can drive that speed consistently. It’s always plus or minus 5 mph, usually wavering between them. I don’t think all of the dozens of drivers in this large subdivision are bad drivers.
Presumably it is a skill like all other aspects of driving, and people have little experience doing it.
That still sounds like a design problem if it requires skill to just drive consistently at 20 mph. Why should that require skill any more than driving consistently at 30 mph?
It requires skills to drive at any speed.
Dude. People manage to do it. If you can’t, practice. If that doesn’t help you, I don’t know what the fuck to tell you except get off the road.
Most people don’t do a great job of staying at exactly 30, but going up and down a few mph at 20 is way more noticeable than at 30.
I don’t see why it’s a big deal. The streets near me that are 20 mph are all residential streets with stop signs, driveways, and street parking. You’re almost never going a consistent speed for more than couple hundred feet anyway.
It’s really difficult to get them to remain at a constant speed under 25 mph or so
You don’t have to drive at exaxtly 25, driving below is just fine
Can’t enable cruise under 40kph (~26mph). It’s a pain.
Why would to need cruise control under 40kph?
The very fact it is signed so low should be a signal to the driver that this is an area which requires an increase in attention paid to surroundings.
Because otherwise you’ll likely end up either speeding or constantly staring at the speedo…
Perhaps that is a driving habit that needs to change? 20mph is a maximum, not a minimum. If you drive with ±3mph variance, target 17.
You answered your own question. So I can concentrate on my surroundings rather then having to try to precisely control the speed of a car that’s not in TCC lockup.
You don’t have to precisely control the speed, just keep it between 0-20mph. Your speed should be dynamic based on what is coming up anyways. Are you just turning on cruise control from the intersection and leaving it until you brake the next time?
I have never even considered using cruise control on anything other than a highway. Am I the one driving wrong?
No, you are not
No, it’s just a different style. It’s like 1 pedal driving with the brake pedal. It would work particularly well with an electric car where the first part of the brake pedal is regen braking.
You probably don’t have the police that we do. They’ll book you for quite a small overspeed.
I feel like they can’t book you for underspeed?
Skill issue! I have no problem maintaining low speeds in my car lol. Honestly, for the safety of those around you, please take a driving course so you can safely practice driving at low speeds.
Idling in 3rd gear = ~19mph… driving manually has its benefits.
I envy your commitment to saving fuel. I would be on the gas in 2nd so I don’t have to faff around changing down when I hit a hill or have to slow down for whatever reason.
