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Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

amsterdam.nl

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Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#171

Post by Tomis02 »

robocat wrote: post #167
jochem9 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cycling infrastructure is much cheaper than car infrastructure. Way less material needed (narrower paths, less foundation) and much lower maintenance costs. Initial investment per cyclist might seem high, but you need to build it before they come. And they come. Just look at Amsterdam (became a cycling city in the 70s) or Paris (started investing heavily in cycling infra a little less than 10 years ago).

> cheap No way is it cheap. Figures for Christchurch: Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. Yes the spending is over many years, but so what. 3% of trips are by bicycle, so this is a pretty shitty deal for the other 97%: https://greaterchristchurch.org.nz/our-work/indicators/urban... People are not…

Your reply is in really bad faith. The person said "cheaper", not "cheap".

Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#172

Post by eesmith »

robocat wrote: post #167
jochem9 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cycling infrastructure is much cheaper than car infrastructure. Way less material needed (narrower paths, less foundation) and much lower maintenance costs. Initial investment per cyclist might seem high, but you need to build it before they come. And they come. Just look at Amsterdam (became a cycling city in the 70s) or Paris (started investing heavily in cycling infra a little less than 10 years ago).

> cheap No way is it cheap. Figures for Christchurch: Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. Yes the spending is over many years, but so what. 3% of trips are by bicycle, so this is a pretty shitty deal for the other 97%: https://greaterchristchurch.org.nz/our-work/indicators/urban... People are not…

So, $3 million/km?

How much does a road cost?

"The 2km stretch of the Bayfair to Baypark upgrade on SH2 south of Tauranga was already costing $70 million per kilometre - two to three times more than usual." https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/425683/highway-costing-7...

That's about $25 million per km in the usual, or about 10x more expensive than this bike path.

"The cost to build a new road link in Christchurch’s west has ballooned 41% to $25 million." says https://www.neighbourly.co.nz/public/christchurch/broomfield... and that appears to be under 2km of road works., so $30 million/km.

"The $290m 16-kilometre Northern Corridor motorway extension, funded by the government, cost $18m a kilometre to build, while the second stage of the southern motorway worked out at $20m per kilometre." says https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/124611551/building-10...

In the US it costs about US (20230) $4 million/mile to put in a new small urban road. https://kobobuilding.com/cost-to-build-a-road-per-mile/ . That's about NZ$4 million/km, if I did the conversion correctly, and still more than the bike path.

> that is $750 per person

Now do the same calculation for roads.

Also, "About $187m of that will come from the Government’s coffers, not ratepayers" says https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/127422028/christchurc... so your math should be adjusted. I work it out to

  ((301_000_000 - 187_000_000) / 405_000) + (187_000_000 / 5_258_000)
  = NZ$317 per Christchurch resident

Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#173

Post by CompuIves »

toomim wrote: post #92
joeman1000 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mustn’t do much walking in your life then.

Or maybe he's like me, and both walks and drives, and doesn't want anybody to have to sit in a car wasting their life for longer than necessary. Efficiency matters.

If you want to be efficient in Amsterdam, you take the bike or public transport. That has been faster than cars even before this change, and now more so.

Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#174

Post by eesmith »

dex69420 wrote: post #137
virtue3 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's a known thing now that widening highways / adding more throughput does not ease congestion etc. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/widen-highways-traffic... .

Are you proposing the for the first time ever The NY Times printed something factual on January 6, 2023? Or is this more of their bullshit?

The NYT is far from the first to publish on the topic of "induced demand". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

If you don't like them, try any of many other sources. Quoting "If you build it, they will drive: Measuring induced demand for vehicle travel in urban areas" (2018) at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09670... :

> There is little dispute among transportation researchers that expanding highway capacity increases vehicle use. This phenomenon is commonly known as induced demand, and it demonstrates a fundamental economic principle: individuals tend to consume more of a good as the price of the good falls. In other words, wider highways increase traffic speeds and reduce the time cost of driving, thereby inducing additional vehicle travel. In the short run, when residential and employment locations are fixed, faster peak period highway speeds attract drivers from alternate routes, modes, and times of day. Then, in the long-run, faster speeds encourage additional social and economic behavior in areas made more accessible by the new highway capacity, which further increases traffic volumes.

> Research studies since the 1960s have suggested that, because of induced demand, the hoped-for benefits from highway expansion tend to be short-lived and do not provide lasting relief to traffic congestion. Early studies by Downs (1962), Smeed (1968), and Thomson (1977) go so far as to argue that, over time and without any other offsetting deterrent, rush-hour traffic speeds tend to revert to their pre-expansion levels. The finding has even been dubbed the Fundamental Law of Road Congestion (Downs, 1962), which asserts that the elasticity of vehicle miles traveled with respect to lane mileage is equal to one, implying that driving increases in exact proportion to highway capacity additions.

Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#175

Post by P_I_Staker »

charcircuit wrote: post #124
jacquesm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a major win for sustainable living regardless of whether you're a car hater or a city dweller or the reverse, after all: cars aren't banned, just slowed down to the same speed as the rest of the traffic, as are mopeds etc. It makes it safer for everybody.

The contents of the article don't matter. People will start flame wars since it's tangential.

No they will not. Not everyone has the toxic combination of stupid and lazy that you car drivers put into your tank every week... try using a tree or the earth. Feet don't need fuel.

Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#176

Post by gumballindie »

28304283409234 wrote: post #157
toomim wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also happened in Portland in 2018, and it sucks, and makes me avoid Portland. The speed limit is 20mph on most roads, no matter how many lanes of empty tarmac there is, what time of day it is, with how much visibility, how straight the road is, etc. It's a blind political statement with no regard to the actual roads and their circumstances.

Because the tarmac is empty does not mean the people and nature living around the roads are gone. Whenever resource sharing with other living creatures pops up in America it somehow gets turned into a 'blind policital statement'.

If you want to reduce the number of cars on roads - which is a sensible approach - you reduce the need for cars. The easiest is to not mandate people to work in offices where not needed. By slowing vehicles down you achieve a placebo effect since said vehicles would be slow anyway when there’s traffic, while they’d be needlessly slow when there is none. Spending more time driving slowly means the same amount of noxious gases being emitted - even if emissions per car are lower, given that they spend more time on the road you gain little benefits.

However safety benefits and noise reduction are an asset. But those can easily be reduced in better more environment friendly ways.

Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#177

Post by ballenf »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #22
ElijahLynn wrote: post #7

The "quieter" aspect is no joke. For the first time in my life, I moved into an apartment near a busy road, the noise is very difficult and I have to wear silicone ear plugs/pillows at night just to sleep because of car noise, especially people with loud motorcycles and trucks and cars that think everyone wants to hear them at 2am. Outside of that over-the-top "flex" noise, just the car noise is fatiguing. One can sa…

The loud motorcycle crowd deserve death. I am a pacifist and believe strongly that love and kindness is the natural state of man, but people unwinding their modified bikes down residential streets are just malicious monsters who torture entire neighborhoods for their perverse pleasure. I don’t buy their “to be noticed by cars on the highway” malarkey, since they wind up their motors to earth shattering levels on city…

Most EU countries have very strict emissions testing. Why can't that be expanded to limit engine noise?

Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#178

Post by bryanlarsen »

Teever wrote: post #19
ls612 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the expectation is that the government can put up speed cameras everywhere and make a shit ton of money.

Why the cynical take? Do you really think that in a country with extensive rail and a bicycle culture as a national identity that the reason for reduced speed limits is a cash grab? Is it so alien to you to consider that perhaps the country is implementing these kinds of laws to reduce the harmful effects of automobiles with the ultimate end game being the extinction of car culture?

Cars not bikes makes a compelling case that the Netherlands is the best place in the world to drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#179

Post by earthling8118 »

dex69420 wrote: post #136
BlarfMcFlarf wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amsterdam notably was designed for cars in the 70s afaik, but they consciously redesigned it over time. So I’m a few decades, it could be your American city.

American cities are built to benefit the people who pay for them. They don’t revamp things to benefit the poors.

An odd take, seeing as it is generally the poorer areas that are subsidizing the richer people's lifestyles. Not the other way around.

Re: Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

#180

Post by wpm »

dex69420 wrote: post #136
BlarfMcFlarf wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amsterdam notably was designed for cars in the 70s afaik, but they consciously redesigned it over time. So I’m a few decades, it could be your American city.

American cities are built to benefit the people who pay for them. They don’t revamp things to benefit the poors.

The city itself is often subsidizing the suburbs around them that bring all the congestion in. Car-oriented suburbs are hugely inefficient.
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