Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
#2Good. Everywhere in the cities the speed limit in residential areas should be 30km/h and 60km/h for everything else. No need for higher speeds in dense urban environments.
Re: Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
#3The sign of an area run by old people
Re: Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
#4The sign of an area run by old people
The sign of people that live in a city that understand how dangerous cars are in a shared space with people.
Re: Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
#5The sign of an area run by old people
What? It’s the children who get run over by speeding assholes.
Re: Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
#6The sign of an area run by old people
The sign of an area with a dense population where people operate within close proximity to people-squashing-machines, and the people have rightly decided that reducing the severity of any potential people-vs-people-squashing-machines incidents is worth far more than the modest reduction in travel time for the occupiers of the people-squashing-machines, most of which never spend much time at 60km/h anyway due to congestion.
Frankly, anyone driving at 60km/h through narrow streets isn't driving with due care and consideration for the surroundings anyway.
Re: Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
#7>slashed from 60km/h (37mph) to 30km/h
> applies to residential roads with no centre line or maximum speed signs, media report
>The measures apply to about 870,000km of roads that are less than 5.5 metres wide and do not have centre lines or median strips, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. They account for about 70% of the country’s general roads, the newspaper said.
So basically they went from no effective speed limit (since most people will probably not drive 60kmh on those kinds of roads if left to their own devices) to a specific speed limit on a bunch of tiny roads that the overwhelming majority of people were probably already going pretty darn slow on for the most part.
I suspect this will just result in a bunch of roads that really were overdue for it getting center lines and specific posted limits getting them and not much change anywhere else.
Re: Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
#8Re: Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
#9Good. Everywhere in the cities the speed limit in residential areas should be 30km/h and 60km/h for everything else. No need for higher speeds in dense urban environments.
Fun fact. In Lithuania there was a standat speed limit 60km/h. But we have this curiosity that if you exceed speed limit by less than 10km/h, there is no fine, just a warning. Basically "hey, could you please not"
Because of that de facto speed limit in streets was 70km/h. So to combat this, currently we have speed limit 50km/h in cities, which translates to de facto 60km/h
Re: Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
#10The article don't have a good picture of a small road. Here's an example https://kuruma-news.jp/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/20230214_g...
Usually these roads are so small, you can barely fit a car and maybe one pedestrian on one / each side. And these streets are quite common in residential area. As in the picture, usually there are light poles along the pedestrian street. the pictures pole is pretty small but normally they're big enough you can only circumvent it by going in the path of the car, and that's a Hotspot when people get hit.
I didn't even know you were allowed to drive 60km/h on those streets. Most people slowed down because the chance of damaging your car is quite high
Edit: also why big American car are not that popular in Japan. You can't even reach your house for many, if you get an American car