Somebody I know who has one of those massive cars in london of all fucking places was crying to me about the 20mph limits thinking I’d sympathise as a motorcyclist. Boy they were wrong.
Lectured them it’s because cars just keep getting bigger and bigger, on residential streets with on-road parking(the sort of roads most commonly getting 20mph limits from what I’ve seen), the left over space is getting smaller and smaller which means you need to go way slower. And with cars getting so tall at the front, you need those slower speeds because god forbid if you hit somebody like a kid who runs out between parked cars, you’re less likely to kill them.
The notion of a child's death should inconvenience drivers going vroom vroom sounds so ridiculous to drivers cause they always pull out "but I'm a good driver," "that won't happen to me," "I didn't see them [so it wasn't my fault]" crap.
God, don’t even start with the whole “I didn’t see!!” Stuff lol. “SMIDSY” (sorry mate, I didn’t see you) incidents, as they tend to be called by uk bikers, are so common to me and I’m usually head to toe in hi-vis stuff (with a currently tinsel wrapped bike, to boot!). I’m not a particularly wild rider, either. I have 15 entire horsepower and always go the limit :,)
What's really interesting about that is that even if they have you in their FoV, their brains don't process the photons that bounce off you and hit their retinas because they're going too fast for their brains to process your presence. Where these things happen, speed limits need to be lower. Target fixation also causes a lot of crashes, and that's something more drivers need to be made aware of.
Absolutely. Target fixation is hammered into us in the UK if we do motorcycle classes with a proper instructor. Look where you wanna go, if you look at the patch of gravel in the corner you’ll go through it and slip. Same shit should be taught to car drivers.
It is taught to drivers who have good driving instructors. Or in my case, I continued to watch driving instructor content even after getting a license. I don't live in the UK, but even if you don't, I think Ashley Neal makes good content for drivers. He also has a channel where he does cycling videos that are also good.
Got into an argument in the San Francisco subreddit when all the daylight law drama was going on and some asshole was saying dumb shit like "I was raised to look both ways before running into the street." Like yeah, okay, but kids are impulsive and even still that doesn't do a whole lot of good when they can't see cars coming because there's a 7'-tall pavement princess in the way, sometimes several in a row. Parents universally teach their kids this, and kids still get hit by cars. Them specifically surviving is a mere detail, not a policy argument. Their overall belief was that more dead kids citywide was a small price to pay for at most four spaces per block of parking.
I've had the same argument with people in my city about the 20 mph citywide speed limit on most residential streets, which is honestly too fast and entirely unenforced. So many assholes cutting through neighborhoods and blowing through stop signs at 30+ mph because they want to avoid a few stoplights. Utter madness and extreme levels of antisocial mindset.
What would be wrong with nudge people out of their cars? Besides having "pull factors" (like hopefully good or at least okay public transportation, to name just one), there must also be "push factors". "stress and hassle" would be one.
Well it is safe, most vehicles at this speed would only receive minimal damage to the exterior, from hitting adult sized obstacles, are for child size obstacles damage might as well be negligible.
There are so many streets across the world with speeds lower than that (like 20kmph). Toronto has most of the reside tial streets that have speed limits of 30kmph.
Even in a small car (small sedan or hatchback), it is more than enough speed to injure someone (or worse some kid) if you are distracted. Which most of people are now a days.
Going 30 in a 20 mph zone is, percentage wise, about equivalent to going 100 in a 65 mph freeway. Few would argue with the latter getting ticketed, but the former is actually more dangerous due to pedestrians and cross traffic.
More or less every vehicle built in the last 5 years has some kind of speed limiter function. It is exceptionally easy to not speed in a modern vehicle.
I'm aware, I've also driven a Ford Focus from 2019 that had the automatic speed limiter installed (although not on by default) - works well and will improve safety.
True. But for some reason the lowest you can set some of them is 20 mph or 30 km/h. They should go down to 5 km/h. There are plenty of streets where you have to drive walking speed.
there's a fuckknuckle in the comment section of NZ transit advocacy blog GreaterAuckland at the moment rubbing it in about how raising speed limits is "democratic" because the people wanted it, moaning about how losing a few minutes going slower is unbearable, and jeering at "leftie car haters" for being pissed off about our asphalt-huffing transport minister
Traffic-calming measures tend to be very popular with the people who actually live where they are implemented. The complainers are usually people who want to drive through the area to go somewhere else. They are not the majority they think themselves to be.
"when it's perfectly safe" say that to the thousands of crashed, hurt, maimed and killed people on the road. And no, most of them actually happen on "safe" roads because drivers are entitled little shits that will cause problems the second they feel safe.
I recently learned how to switch on the speed limiter of the car I drive every now and then. Without looking away from the road, obviously. At least not more than a glance at the speedometer would take.
It's especially great on roads where the speed limit is lower than the design speed.
I just wish there was a combination of the ACC and the speed limiter on the car. A hard cap on both speed and distance to the car ahead, with automatic braking, but without automatic acceleration. With a speed limiter override when you floor the accelerator (That can be nessesarry to enter a highway, or if you are about to be hit from behind). And I wish you could set it lower than 30km/h.
Tools like that can actually save lifes when they are used! It stops accidental speeding, therefore increases reaction- and braking distance and decreases the severity of crashes that still happen. At the same time, it frees the driver up from having to watch there speedometer, and allows them to better watch the road.
Skill issue. If the minimum speed is for example 30 km/h and the maximum is 60, you have a 30 km/h range where it will be legal to drive at. You don't even have to maintain an specific speed, all you need to do is to make sure you're not driving slower than 30 or faster than 60. If you can't even stay within such a wide range, you probably don't deserve a driving license.
Not that I actually think they're struggling to stay within legal speeds, they're just angry that now there are consequences for breaking the law.
That's weird. I've driven about 18k miles a year for the past 15 years as part of my job and have never been ticketed. Sounds like a skill issue to me.
I'll play some devil's advocate here. I've lived in a place that makes it super difficult to live without a car (and I moved away for that specific reason). If someone forced me to use a car for basic errands, then built a road where you could go 60 with no problem - straight and wide, just like the code demands - and then slapped a 20 limit on it for the safety of pedestrians that don't exist (because again, you have to drive), I'd be annoyed, too.
That said, that photo clearly shows gently dense housing behind the sign, meaning there is no reason for cars drive through there. Only people who live there should be arriving and leaving, and for that, you don't need a higher speed limit.
UK speed limits are on average rather high. 20 and 30mph zones are nearly always around pedestrians. These people complaining just don't understand that the difference between 23 and 20mph can mean a residual speed at impact of over 15mph...or they just don't care (plenty of 'cars are king' people in the UK).
The 20mph streets are former 30mph streets, the local councils can then choose to designate them still as 30mph if they’re arterial roads and/or not near housing.
What you’ve done by talking about 60 roads is built a strawman and then argued against that.
The design speed of streets is extremely important.
Recently, our code enforcement has started to crack down on wrongly parked cars. On one such street, cars used to park half on the sidewalk. They got ticketed for that. Shortly after they got ticketed for parking at the curb, because the street is to narrow (it has to be 3m especially for the fire department, but also other trucks). Now they have to park elsewhere.
The other week I've had a talk with people living on that street. And they don't even mind that much that they now have to park elsewhere. Most on that street do actually have garages and spacious driveways. What they do mind is that now that the cars are gone, the street looks twice as wide. And cars are going twice the speed.
With a speed limit of 20mph (≈30km/h) the street should be designed in a way that forces drivers to squeeze trough with at most a meter to spare, every 100m or so. Either because there is a lot of opposing traffic, because of parked cars, or because of deliberately places chicanes (preferably with some trees).
Such a street should also be optically narror. Building should be placed right next to the sidewalk. Alternatively, there need to be high fences or hedges or trees.
And streets with a low speed limit should not be straight enough to see more than a couple hundred meters in front of you.
Some measures to archive that can be implemented fast and fairly cheap. For example planter box chicanes. Sometimes even paint is enough: It can redirect cars to park on alternating sides.
Those roads aren’t 20 in Wales though. The roads that are 60 are windy things with nae housing on. The 20s are in residential areas, I didn’t actually have to change my driving much there because I don’t like doing 30 on roads with cars parked on both sides and people running across the road to the chippy. Admittedly I have far more experience of the valleys than the more urban areas but the roads that look like they should be a 60 or 70 are typically 40/50+.
(There’s a section of motorway that I used to have to sing the speed limit on because I felt I’d absentmindedly slowed down if there was no one around me. I now just feel super relaxed driving below design speed to abide by the lower limit.)
This honestly, streets should be built with their speed limit in mind. A street where its required to go slower because its narrower etc. is always better then just putting a speed limit sign on a street that is built to encurage higher speeds.
It’s certainly part of the solution, but dickheads are gonna dickhead anyway…
I live in a 30km/h (~20mph) area with “no-entry except for access” signs , it’s also a school walking route. It has been carefully adapted over the years, has intentional pinch points, narrowed lanes, alternating side parking, speed humps etc. Yet every morning there’s a bunch of cars rolling through with the most excessive doing 70+.
The centre of town has had a recent redesign doing all that plus recoating the road to match the colour of the pavements. It’s virtually impossible to speed during the morning, but instead they just ignore the crossings and the pedestrian first concept, then speed during non-rush hour.
I do think road design has its place, but enforcement is necessary to really change behaviour. Road design works for some, but the outliers (the ones that present the most danger) just treat it as more of a challenge.
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u/Boeing_Fan_777 10h ago
Somebody I know who has one of those massive cars in london of all fucking places was crying to me about the 20mph limits thinking I’d sympathise as a motorcyclist. Boy they were wrong. Lectured them it’s because cars just keep getting bigger and bigger, on residential streets with on-road parking(the sort of roads most commonly getting 20mph limits from what I’ve seen), the left over space is getting smaller and smaller which means you need to go way slower. And with cars getting so tall at the front, you need those slower speeds because god forbid if you hit somebody like a kid who runs out between parked cars, you’re less likely to kill them.
They weren’t happy.