411–420 of 696 posts
This is one of the things I find difficult about travelling abroad, particularly with children. I'm used to incredibly high safety standards, and when I'm in traffic in many other places in the world it feels like going back a few decades. Genuine question: we have a lot of research on how not to die in traffic (lower speeds around pedestrians, bicyclists stopped ahead of cars in intersections, children in backward f…
> More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, the majority were limited to 50 km/h For us metric-impaired, 30 km/h ~ 19 mph. In the United States, school zones with children present are generally 15-25mph. fit adult humans run at 8-9 mph. If it works for Finns and they like it, great. Americans would not accept speed limits so low.
If you have a road wide enough to drive 50 and try to post a speed limit of 30 drivers in all countries will complain.
If you design a road so that driving above speed limit doesn’t feel safe, drivers will naturally stick to it.
I can see it in city center Warsaw - we keep narrowing internal roads and the traffic naturally adjusts to that, whereas if a road is wider/longer/straighter people will drive faster regardless of the speed limit.
In US there is a higher disconnect between the posted speed limit and the road width.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speed enforcement has been extensively studied, and there are a lot of publicly available articles on the subject. The results are basically universally in favour of speed enforcement reducing motor vehicle collisions, reducing injury and cost.
Zero MPH = zero traffic = zero road deaths. But without transport significantly more people will die from other things, due to reduced access to healthcare, employment, food, etc. In a modern society, road transport is a critical part of our life support system. Those pushing for a what they see as a car-free utopia tend to ignore this.
Same goes with the right of way in these places. You're in a car, you're getting where you're going much faster anyway, so you let pedestrians go first. On pedestrian crossings, and often even without them in such "last leg" places.
It's completely logical. You don't go faster in places where somebody can suddenly walk out from behind a parked car, bush, whatever. But it's a cultural thing in Scandinavia.
> More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, the majority were limited to 50 km/h For us metric-impaired, 30 km/h ~ 19 mph. In the United States, school zones with children present are generally 15-25mph. fit adult humans run at 8-9 mph. If it works for Finns and they like it, great. Americans would not accept speed limits so low.
If you have a road wide enough to drive 50 and try to post a speed limit of 30 drivers in all countries will complain.
If you design a road so that driving above speed limit doesn’t feel safe, drivers will naturally stick to it.
I can see it in city center Warsaw - we keep narrowing internal roads and the traffic naturally adjusts to that, whereas if a road is wider/longer/straighter people will drive faster regardless of the speed limit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Where did anyone say that??? As for trucks having the same speed limit as cars in general: 1) a lot of the time there is a lower limit, 2) the truck itself has a lower max highway speed, 3) there a far fewer trucks on the road so it doesn't matter a much, 4) they are driven by professional drivers with things like electronically enforced daily driving limits, so many of the common causes of accidents are less likely.
Where in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, UK, Canada, or even most of US can you go 10 km/h over speed limit and not get fined?
For your other points.
1. Where? other than steep grades, differential speed is not a thing. 2. Where again? Which trucks? Majority of trucks can do highway speed just fine, despite their 3 to 10x stopping distance. 3. Fewer tracks where? Most of Australia and New Zealand runs on trucks. But even if they're rare, truck accidents over 60 are often fatal due to their weight and energy. 4. Professional drivers can't adjust the laws of physics. Stopping distance is stopping distance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Speed enforcement has been extensively studied, and there are a lot of publicly available articles on the subject. The results are basically universally in favour of speed enforcement reducing motor vehicle collisions, reducing injury and cost.
Yeah this argument comes up a lot in the UK from people advocating 20mph speed limits everywhere. It's a super dumb argument though. Obviously increasing speed is never going to decrease danger. But if "slower is safer" is the only argument for 20mph then the logical conclusion is 0mph.
Clearly there are other factors at play, but the 20mph people never acknowledge that for some reason...
(To be clear I'm not advocating for 30mph everywhere. I feel like 25mph is actually the best trade-off for most suburban roads.)
This is one of the things I find difficult about travelling abroad, particularly with children. I'm used to incredibly high safety standards, and when I'm in traffic in many other places in the world it feels like going back a few decades. Genuine question: we have a lot of research on how not to die in traffic (lower speeds around pedestrians, bicyclists stopped ahead of cars in intersections, children in backward f…
What more action could be taken on it?
> More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, the majority were limited to 50 km/h. So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere, taking time away from everyone’s lives. You can achieve no traffic deaths by slowing everyone to a crawl. That doesn’t make it useful or good. The goal should be fast travel times and easy driving while also still reduci…
Like others have pointed out making road speeds faster barely makes a dent in travel times. The absolute best way to reduce travel times is to build denser cities, which incidentally means less parking, narrower roads, and, most importantly, fewer cars. In a densely populated area it's impossible to match the throughput of even a small bike path with anything built for cars. Safety is just a bonus you get for designing better, more efficient, more livable cities.