A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Apparently pedestrians should take personal responsibility but not drivers
Honestly, this only exemplifies why speed limits by themselves don’t work. We have to design the streets so that the lower speed feels reasonable.
I know I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but it’s always worth saying.
The go-to method right now seems to be to enforce it electronically, using the systems that are built into most new cars nowadays. Personally I'm not a fan of that, but it IS preferable to having all the surveillance electronics built into cars and just not doing anything worthwhile with it.
I don't understand how they want to use cars to enforce this electronically. My car tries to tell me the speed limit, and it's often wrong. I think you need to have a signal built into the road to tell cars the speed limit, and that sounds expensive and impractical.
But designing roads so lower speed feels reasonable is very effective. You can make the road narrower, curvier and bumpier is various ways, but you can also make it appear or feel narrower, curvier and bumpier without actual making it so.
The electronic solutions are definitely shit shows. They're probably going to try and use them to enforce it, anyway. If nothing else, it's cheaper than building speedbumps etc. everywhere.
I shudder to think what will happen when I'm driving on a 120 kph highway and the camera on my windscreen sees a 30 sign on a dirt road next to the highway.
I don't like that my car sees a faded 80 sign and reads it as 30 and keeps going 80 (but starts flashing the speed on the screen)
There’s another method using visual design that “calms” traffic. Ex, if you have a wide road, paint the sides of it a notable color that visually corrals people to a tighter space. They have the sides if absolutely needed, but recognize they need to go slower to stay within the lines.
You need forceful enforcement in some situations, but for the most part it pays to inspect the psychology that gets people to behave a certain way.
i've long thought that all the rural roads that are like, 1.9 lanes wide should just be repainted so there's one lane in the middle and generous shoulders, like those bike-first roads in the netherlands on a budget.
It is very possible to make higher speeds seem extremely unreasonable to drivers.
Having the streets be cobblestone instead of asphalt, for one, makes driving faster louder and more difficult for drivers. I'm not rooting for cars, I'm just saying there are so many methods that governments just don't think are worth implementing because they value corporate lobbying more than citizen safety.
But ... that exasperates so many issues that cars already cause. Like noise pollution, street maintenance costs (IDK maybe cobblestone lasts longer, but it's for sure expensive to change a street into cobblestone vs. leaving it as-is), it compromises road safety for people who will drive fast anyway, and on streets that are too narrow for separate bike lanes they compromise bike safety (if we assume that cars start driving slow enough that it's reasonably safe to ride a bicycle on that streets).
Sure, speed bumps are better solutions that cobblestone?
One thing that people forget when talking about speed limits is the physical infrastructure.
Feeling reasonable is directly correlated to the designed speed of the road, meaning it's an engineering problem. If a road isn't engineered to its specifications the speed limits imposed are merely a suggestion.
Yep, have a highway by me that is three lanes (sometimes 4), has good sized shoulders on both sides, median divider, and it's pretty much dead straight. Speed limit is 55mph but most people go 70 or more cause you can without issue.
I can't think of any roads around me that have pedestrians and a speed limit of 50+. All the places pedestrians are 40 at most and have guardrails between the sidewalk and road. Usually 25 is the norm when pedestrians will be present.
I live near a state highway that just recently lowered the local speed limit to 40. No physical barrier and loads of intersections and crosswalks.