161–170 of 202 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I see your transient crowd of loud motorcycles and raise you a stationary team of suburban gas-powered leaf blowers.
So many comments in here using the context of US cities and missed that Amsterdam (like most big european cities) is not designed for high throughput car transportation and as a result painting that decision as making things "crazy slow" and that it "sounds terrible". I highly encourage you to go live a week in a big old european city (Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Madrid) without renting a car to understand why…
I imagine bicycles may exceed the limit now.
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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?
Because I see technology as a being used as a means to social control and authoritarian rule. Most HN commenters are perfectly willing to see this as well when it comes to DRM, remote attestation, secure boot, etc, but magically forget that when discussion of traffic and cars comes up.
Cars are a privilege, you need a licence from the government to drive them, are you going to advocate for removing driver licencing as well? Because that's pretty much full government control over who can drive or not. Pretty authoritarian, no?
That’s crazy slow! I can’t even begin to think of how long it would take to get anywhere. By comparison, “The Texas Transportation Commission is allowed to bump up the speed limit in certain sections to 75, 80 and 85 mph, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. The speed limit can be raised if the highway is deemed safe and reasonable..” Also.. you can typically avoid a ticket by arguing you were still d…
If you design your city properly then it would not take long at all. In fact, you may not even have to drive most of the time.
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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.
It can be a political statement, or it can be about noise and pedestrian safety, depending on the environment. Basically, it's irresponsible to drive faster than 30 km/h anywhere with a significant number of pedestrians. The risk of serious injury and death rises quickly above that speed, and human drivers cannot react quickly enough at higher speeds. You can justify a bit higher speed limits on major streets with si…
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…
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).
No way is it cheap. Figures for Christchurch:
Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m
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 voting for this with their bicycle trips. This is just local government spending public money for rather unpopular outcomes.
That's 18.6 mph, slower than the speed limit around US schools. Is the expectation people will go 20 or 25 mph (32 to 40 km/h) in reality?
I think the expectation is that they will eventually traffic calm the streets until people really go 30km/h. (Or speed a little, probably not 40 km/h.) FWIW, 20mph school zones seem to be becoming more common in the US.
So many comments in here using the context of US cities and missed that Amsterdam (like most big european cities) is not designed for high throughput car transportation and as a result painting that decision as making things "crazy slow" and that it "sounds terrible". I highly encourage you to go live a week in a big old european city (Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Madrid) without renting a car to understand why…
Exactly. most of the roads in Amsterdam will have people driving on them at or below that speed without any official limit. I imagine bicycles may exceed the limit now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I foresee a future where people who have become deranged by motorcycle noise build small quadcopters that have a steel piece in their frame and a sound detector that when triggered make the quadcopter fly insanely fast towards a motorcycle wheel, lodging that piece of steel right inside the wheel causing the motorcycle driver to lose control and die.