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

amsterdam.nl

141–150 of 202 posts

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US it wouldn't make sense. Spending 2 hours to go to the grocery store and back just on the travelling part would be a big commitment whenever you needed to go.

> Spending 2 hours to go to the grocery store and back That usually indicates your city is a huge suburbia with a few skyscrapers in the middle. Bad city design leads to bad results, and a higher speed limit won't solve your problems.

Indeed. Just to put a number on that, the average distance to a supermarket is 400 meter (~1300 feet) in Amsterdam.

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

#142
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the thing, apartments in US/Canada are in 'trashier' pockets of the city. Single family homes are well located mostly and don't have such problems. Reason is simply - apartments were put there they are well after city was fully developed. Speaking from my experience in Toronto/Montreal areas. Thus I disagree about traffic noise, it's a necessary evil. Real evil is vast zones of single family areas in the city li…

Some new apartments in 5-over-2 buildings sure. But developers only build apartments in areas that already have high land value, this includes areas like center city, Phila, the loop in Chicago, the central west end in St. Louis, etc,

It is obviously not the case that developers only build in the Loop in Chicago; in fact, virtually none of the housing built in Chicago is built in the Loop.

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

#143
They have introduced 30km/h limits in my city center (Christchurch, New Zealand). Also introduced synchronized lights to reduce traffic speed. Plus techniques to take traffic away from city center. And reducing parking.

Traffic is now far more congested - as must have been expected by the planners. And people are avoiding going to the city center for shopping/meals/etcetera.

AFAIK the planners do not measure outcomes: intention of changes is A/B/C but do they measure that A/B/C occurred?

I think one major aim is reducing the number of cars hitting cyclists and pedestrians. No idea whether that is being achieved.

The one council planner I know is a cycling nut! It is "interesting" watching the results of expensive cycling upgrades. On a per cycling trip basis (per person using the upgrades), the changes appear to me to be hidiously overpriced. Let's see how it pans out over the decades. I cycled to work every day for a while through the city center so I do understand some of the needs.

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

#144
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is terrible. They introduced similar speed limits in parts of London UK and it sucks. It does help with noise pollution but driving in London on empty roads at 20 mph is horrible.

Seattle dropped residential speed limits to 20mph some time ago. Havent followed up to see what impact that has had yet... Most roads though still kepts their old speed limits. What happens in the US when speeds are too low, is you get half the people obeying it, and half of them driving way faster. It creates a dangerous conflict q lot of times. People road rage like crazy in some areas and will do dangerous shit li…

They haven't put in any road diets in Seattle and the cops aren't enforcing traffic laws so everyone just drives the way they used to. So you've got 25 mph limits on 4-lane stroads with no pedestrian traffic (like literally no sidewalks in one case I can think of) and everyone does 45 mph.

It looks like they're going to start using speed cameras now instead of police enforcement (they certainly don't want to use police enforcement here, that would clearly turn out badly). They're trialing "racing cameras" to supposedly catch the kids drag racing at night, but it is obviously a way to introduce enforcement of the 25 mph limits without doing road redesign and to generate revenue.

The result is pretty obviously going to be regressive taxation, because Seattle/Washington State runs everything via regressive taxation. So the traffic cameras are not being setup on W Seattle Bridge to catch white collar people commuting to the office, but are put on W Marginal Way which are going to catch blue collar workers.

I'm just waiting for liberal Seattle to wake up one morning and realize the DOT is funding their bike lanes by regressive taxation through traffic camera enforcement, falling on the lower class and minorities, and see if their heads explode or not.

There's a way to do it right like Amsterdam where they've already built all the infrastructure and done all the road diets, we're doing it the ass-backwards way by dropping the speed limits and setting up traffic cameras.

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

#145
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... .

Yes, it really does. Traffic engineering is an entire field of civil engineering. This has been studied for over a century, and the effect of widening highways and increasing speed limits can be simulated mathematically: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_engineering_(transport... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01912...

It's the psychology that they don't take into account. Making travel times better in one area makes more people take more trips or change when they take trips, making it worse again until some kind of equilibrium is reached over a year or a couple of years (which is often around the same kind of travel times you had before the upgrade).

You could absolutely make traffic better by increasing lanes somewhere where the population was generally decreasing at a decent rate, of course, but population growth is another source in many places - you can't build enough new capacity in a lot of areas to keep up with the growth.

The fundamental problem is that cars are a very space inefficient way of moving people - that's why we see this problem in cities but don't tend to see it in rural areas (because they don't have many people but have plenty of space, so the volumetric inefficiency doesn't matter), and why you don't tend to see the issue much with rail other transit - since they have so much passenger capacity for the space they take up, if there's induced demand there's often scope for increasing service frequency.

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

#147

They have introduced 30km/h limits in my city center (Christchurch, New Zealand). Also introduced synchronized lights to reduce traffic speed. Plus techniques to take traffic away from city center. And reducing parking. Traffic is now far more congested - as must have been expected by the planners. And people are avoiding going to the city center for shopping/meals/etcetera. AFAIK the planners do not measure outcomes…

I work next to a road in Amsterdam where cars are currently driving 50 and will have to drive 30.

My view is that the cars always have to wait at the traffic lights, because it is too busy with traffic. So essentially they speed up to 50 just to stop again moments later. Therefore I think the time difference will not be very big.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spending 2 hours to go to the grocery store and back That usually indicates your city is a huge suburbia with a few skyscrapers in the middle. Bad city design leads to bad results, and a higher speed limit won't solve your problems.

Indeed. Just to put a number on that, the average distance to a supermarket is 400 meter (~1300 feet) in Amsterdam.

When giving rough estimates of distance, yards and meters are often close enough to substitute. (400 meters ~= 437 yards ~~= 400 yards)

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

#149

18 miles per hour? My average pace on a bicycle is 20 mph. This is hysterical.

That's kind of the point. Part of the design of Dutch cities is to make the fastest, most direct, most convenient form of transportation _not_ the car. You use a car when you _have_ to, not simply as a default. If it takes longer to get to your intra-city destination in a car, that's the city working as intended.

> Part of the design of Dutch cities is to make the fastest, most direct, most convenient form of transportation _not_ the car.

That's only a good thing if you accomplish it by making other forms of transportation faster and more direct. It's a bad thing if you do it by making cars slower and less direct.

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

#150

With cars getting bigger in many places, I would like to remind policy makers that Speed X Mass = Force. Slowing traffic in urban areas is just good sense if we care about pedestrians.

> Speed X Mass = Force

That's not true.

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