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I've seen a few YT videos that tell you the exact opposite. If you design the streets to feel "dangerous" to the driver, they will naturally pay attention, slow down and make the streets safer for everyone. You could plant some more tress, make the streets narrower etc.
Sure, people can't drive to places as fast, but that's not really a problem. If more people decide to use public transport instead, it's just going to make the city nicer for everyone.
It's not either/or. Those videos say that street design is important (i.e. if you make a wide and long stretch of asphalt, you can set a limit of 30 km/h, but nobody's going to stick to it), but they don't say that you can make a winding, cobble-stoned street lined with trees, and then put the speed limit at 100 km/h.
And as the article says, doing both is exactly what Helsinki did.
People prefer to drive at the speed dictated by the road design. If it feels natural to drive at 60 km/h, people will do exactly that even if it is illegal. if it's a narrow cobble stone path with poor visibility, it feels much more natural to slow down to something like 20...40 km/h. The legal speed limit might be higher, but people just don't feel comfortable driving faster, so they won't.
In rural areas you can find some absurdly tight bends that have been there for at least a hundred years and were probably designed by cattle or sheep. The speed limit could be 80 km/h, but there's a warning about a tight bend and a recommended speed. You slow down to 60 km/h, but it feels kinda dangerous. You slow down to the recommended 40 km/h but it still feels uncomfortable. You finally pass the bend at 30 km/h and that felt like you barely made it.
Every now and then, you'll also find some fearless people, who usually end up wrapping their car around the nearest tree. They are immune to speed limits and only mildly resistant to good road design. These concepts don't apply to the people who are striving to win the Darwin Award, but they are still relevant to everyone else though.
Yes, I am not arguing that street design doesn't matter, and I'm not arguing that speed limits are always adhered to. All I'm saying is that none of those clips say that speeds limits do not matter at all. Usually they'll say that they need to be combined with traffic calming measures like bends, roads, and cobblestones.
It actually is! Either car kills, or a person lives. And research can prove that some removes deaths and other things not.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find research that looked at a real-life situation where speed-limiting measures were taken without a low speed limit being applied.
I think it's implied that street design is part if the limit. I've not been there but I bet that streets are narrow, with speed bumps and chicanes
Not just implied:
The older parts of town definitely seem that way, although those streets weren't really designed in the modern sense of the word. In suburbs though, you do have intentionally narrow sections and bump, occasionally even combined to a brutal choke point. Either way, people don't want to drive there unless it's absolutely necessary, so they'll take the PT instead. Seems to be working.
What's the source of those videos? How could making the slow down mandatory not be more efficient at slowing them down?
Slowing down traffic will motivate more people to use public transport.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/6/the-key-to-slowing-traffic-is-street-design-not-speed-limits Its a very NA-centric organisation but a hood one. In europe the streets often look differently
Another example of a narrowed street https://www.threads.com/@thetransitguy/post/DD7VyqTx4-y?from_lookaside=1
Itβs more about the psychological. Setting arbitrary speed limits isnβt enough. If some idiot driver think itβs safe to speed, they will.
I believe Helsinki is aware of this and is one of the many measures theyβve made to limit traffic deaths.
People ignore speed limits. You design the street to feel best at the speed you want people to go.
One of the States, I think Maine? Took a road and adjusted the posted speed limit at various points spanning like 20 mph differences, and at all posted speeds the average actual traffic speed was still the same. Because that speed felt right for that road to most drivers, regardless of what was legal.
If there are good alternative options for public transport, then the slower speed limits and roads designed to slow traffic will gradually shift people to use those options instead.
One huge difference is in how Finland calculate fines. They scale with your income.
Take a look at the description of these two:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6LIYQRglnM
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
So you suggest that speed limits would increase traffic deaths? Is this right? Where are these YT videos?
If I understand him correctly, it's not about removing speed limits, but by making the driver enforce the speed limit without rules. Like, people drive slower (on average) when the street is narrow.
Yeah and the free market will regulate itself... Maybe most people will self regulate but most people don't get into accidents, you only need a minority to be assholes for a crash to happen.
Regulation helps everyone.
I think you are misunderstanding.
Divided highways in Finland have speed limits of 100-120km/h.
If you build a new road that looks like a divided highway, but you put up 30km/h signage... People are going to drive 120km/h. They aren't going to drive 30km/h just because it is the posted speed limit. They are going to drive the 120km/h that they drive on every other road that looks like this one.
Major roads in urban areas of Finland have speed limits of 50km/h.
If you build a new road that looks like a major road, and you put up 30km/h signs... people are going to drive 50km/h.
Here's the important part that you're not quite following: Residential roads in Finland are 30km/h. If you build a road that looks like a residential road, and you put up 50km/h signs... people are going to drive 30km/h, not 50.
Nobody is saying we should get rid of the speed limits. Yes, we certainly do need them. What we are saying is that people are going to drive at the speeds that the road design supports, regardless of the posted speed limit. If you actually want people to drive 30km/h, your road needs to look and feel like a 30km/h road.
Anecdotal, but I lived in a rather large allotment, established in the 1960s. We had no pavement markings on the blacktop. No edge lines, no center lines. Everyone drove 20-25mph throughout. Then, the city decided to paint solid centerlines and edge lines on the primary access road through the allotment. Now, everyone drives 35-45mph on that part, while they're still at 20-25mph in the rest of the allotment. The pavement markings make the exact same road feel like a primary artery rather than a residential side street.
If you wanted to accomplish the reverse, you could withhold the centerline markings and paint crosswalks instead. Paradoxically, two-way stops or even "yield" signs can (in certain cases) reduce speeds more than 4-way stops.
I'm not saying I support that idea, but that thus is what I think the idea is.
What I think is that we need both: tighter speed limits, and less inviting roads. Also ban on small dick middle age cars.
I have an idea of what cars you are referring to and that sounds like a US problem my friend :)
I mean, Ferrari, Bugatti, Porche, Mazzaratti, Lamborghini are all European cars. It's not only in the US.
Sorry, but your spelling was too funny and I have to nitpick. Porsche and Maserati*
I said funny because you might want to look up what "porche" means in colloquial Italian.
Indeed these are generally super/sports car, and you see very few of them in Europe, except for exceptionally rich places. Even in Europe though you see many SUV in cities and I started seeing more and more huge tanks (like pickup-trucks), which I think are more common in US right now.
My bad. You can tell how much I don't like (these) cars. Which language did I spell wrong? Is it still German?
I distinguish between SUVs that are big and stupid but are not severely bad to these stupid Dodge RAM like cars that rarely have an excuse for them.
But yes, people get addicted to big cars that 90% of the time don't justify the cost (in multiple terms)
Porsche is German I believe. Maserati is Italian.
Yeah indeed they are not comparable. I have a huge pickup truck in my building and is on another scale. The problem is also that it's a vicious circle, the more you see cars this big on the road, the more you don't want to be the only one with what looks like a go-kart in comparison.
Oh, I was thinking of giant trucks, I don't think the general middle age people has Ferrari money though.
Jajaja I didn't think of them..
I believe that both should be banned from the heart if cities. For pretty much the same reasons.
(Honestly, from city centres, I think that all cars should be bannes, but I'm extremist in that sense)
I still don't get the appeal to ban supercars in cities, I feel like I've seen like 2 of them in my whole life. Where do you live that their presence is prominent enough to ask for a ban?
If that ever becomes a law, I would really like to see whatβs the official legal way to describe that type of car.
Hereβs one. The others tell the same story with different words.
I think, and this is not based on anything concrete, that if people drive slower, the traffic is more spread, and there are less accidents (and less stress) so there is less jams. Which means you actually get faster.
Of course, of you manage to direct more people to PT, then it is even better since, again, they will get faster (and less stressed)
Makes sense, but I'm not a traffic design engineer, so what do I know. I'm pretty sure traffic congestion has been studied extensively, so there should be a pretty good model on how they develop and what causes them. Speed might be one of those factors.
However, I have seen some videos about speed change causing congestion. Let's say someone panics because of a moose on a highway, breaks abruptly for a while, and then moves on. That spot will continue to have some sort of congestion long after the incident took place.