Lowering the speed limit where there are sidewalks next to cars driving seems to work well in Europe. But that also requires policing of those speed limits so they are not considered mere suggestions by drivers.
Europe has a lot more roads with a lower design speed. Curves, narrow lanes, on-street parking, trees/poles/etc close to the road. These things cause people to drive slower, because it doesn't feel safe to go fast.
In North America, roads are usually built in the complete opposite way, with long straight roads and wide lanes, so the design speed is actually quite high -- even if that wasn't the intent. People go fast, because it feels safe to go that speed, but isn't, because there are pedestrians and turns. We then "fix" that shit road design by having low speed limits.
The problem we keep having is that you have a highway that goes through a town, and it should be a highway. Its purpose is to connect the larger cities on either end of the highway at high speed. And it's perfectly simple to do that, you just make it a limited access road and then the town has other roads with lower speeds for local people.
But the local residents don't want that, because they want the traffic from the road to come into the little town and patronize local businesses. So they put the businesses along the main road and put pedestrians where the traffic is, and then complain about the speed limit on the road whose purpose was supposed to be high speed travel.
Why should something that goes through a town be a highway? Highways should be between and around towns. A town itself is for living in, and anyone coming into town should do so in a way that respects that (i.e. not at high speed). That also makes it far more attractive to actually stop and patronise local businesses.
> Why should something that goes through a town be a highway?
Because the town wants to be as close to the highway as possible, which in practice means the town gets built on either side of it and the highway ends up going straight through the town.
If you moved the highway outside of the town then the town would just move over there because the businesses next to the highway get more business.
I'm not sure if that's true. In my country, most towns don't have a highway that run through them, and there are no calls to change that. People like easy access to the highways, but that means easily getting out of town to get to the highway.
Nobody actually moves next to the highway - it's mostly workplaces that are next to the highway so that employees can easily get to it. Businesses that have regular people visit as customers, however, are where those customers are, which is where they live and walk around.
You've getting to the root of the problem in the US: The zoning doesn't allow businesses where a lot of people live because it's zoned exclusively for single-family homes. The "town" is mainly businesses, and they want to be near the highway.
Just put enough speed cameras, they are much cheaper than any human police guys in long run, can watch 24/7 things like red lights, stops, seat belts, using of phones while driving etc. They can be even connected together for those a-holes who slow down in front of them just go enter again lightspeed right after, its not rocket science in 2024 and all required tech is there for decade and a half.
Here in Switzerland even foreigners have their cheeks so tight on the roads even sharpened hair wouldn't cross, they behave like angels and traffic is generally well behaved. And when they don't, punishment is heavy and it doesn't matter how many millions you have on your account or whom you know.
Have this, and peace comes. Don't have it, fast a-hole drivers doing whatever they want is not your biggest problem anyway.
Suppose you have a misaligned intersection, so a car that drives straight through ends up on the sidewalk. This is a bad design because pedestrians get hit by cars.
Suppose you have the same intersection but put bollards on the sidewalk. This is a bad design because drivers hit the bollards and damage their cars.
You want a design where cars go through the intersection without hitting anything.
No. You want an intersection that is safe for everyone outside of cars, and bollards help do that. If drivers aren’t capable of negotiating streets with them, then they shouldn’t be driving, or they should be driving a smaller vehicle. The idea that we should be building our streets to make driving easier is exactly how we’ve ended up with so many people being killed by cars every year in the US. Car centric design is a failed experiment of the last 75 years.
> You want an intersection that is safe for everyone outside of cars
Why would you not want an intersection that is safe for everyone, period?
> If drivers aren’t capable of negotiating streets with them, then they shouldn’t be driving, or they should be driving a smaller vehicle.
The size of the vehicle isn't what causes most collisions. Moreover, there are certain roads that have a disproportionate number of collisions. That implies there is something wrong with the road. Roads should be designed for actual reality rather then ideal hypothetical drivers and conditions.
> The idea that we should be building our streets to make driving easier is exactly how we’ve ended up with so many people being killed by cars every year in the US.
That is not how we've ended up there. It was quite the opposite. We made driving a necessity by moving people to the suburbs, without making roads safe enough that everybody could do it, and then demanded it of them regardless.
It isn't the monkey's fault that the only housing he can afford is 30 miles from his job and he has to take a road full of obstructions to get there. The monkey's behavior is predictable, and we know that what happened last year will happen next year unless we do something different. "Damage the monkey's car" is not a solution, it's just the fast track to angry monkeys.
> In Houston, bollards and raised pedestrian paths were removed recently (after being installed last year) because drivers kept hitting them.
So the city chooses not to pay the cost of protecting pedestrians, in favor of letting individual pedestrians bear the risk, and cost, of being injured themselves. If ever there were a better example of externalizing costs ….
I wonder if there is a wrongful death basis to sue a city into having safe streets. I know in the US disability groups have successfully sued cities due to a lack of curb ramps.
These are only useful for otherwise-law-abiding people who go a little too fast. The trend in big cities in the US is to joyride/race with your license plates removed, obscured, or fake, and that's assuming the car isn't stolen (Kia/Hyundai.)
I think there would be constitutional challenges in the US, but in Canada, the police are allowed/required to seize your vehicle roadside for certain offenses (unfair if you are found not to have committed and offense, but I've never heard of that happening).
Cameras only catch criminals after the fact. Bollards directly save lives. In the example here, even if the law is a potential deterrent, killing a person was only punished with three years in prison. Bollards work even if the courts don’t.
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. Until then, we have bollards.
Or even better: put speed bumps, narrow lanes, add chokepoints, lots of design features that physically force drivers to slow down instead of speed cameras that don't impede anything for someone wanting to speed.
And raising speed limits where appropriate. US speed limits right now are often set at about the right level on urban and suburban roads, but far too low on highways and other roads intended for long-distance travel. This effectively causes people to speed at dangerous levels in the suburbs and cities - it does not slow everyone down everywhere.
Edit: The statement "speed limits are about right" does not mean "current travel speeds are about right." If you read the rest of the comment, it means that current travel speeds are about 5-10 mph too fast for most roads, but you don't actually need to change any signs if you start making speed limits a credible fact about the actual speed limit of the road.
I'm very curious where your data comes from to back up this statement. "The current level of pedestrian fatalities from motor vehicle collisions is the right level" just seems wrong to me.
The obviously-too-low speed limits cause all speed limits to be called into question. Thus, Americans drive about 10 mph over the limit on suburban roads, where lots of fatalities occur, and the opinion that speed limits are too low is very common. Also, significant data exists that shows that the vast majority of fatalities involve a driver that is speeding.
Do you have any data to contradict this? The statement you are asking for data about is an opinion, and asking for data to back up an opinion is at best a logical fallacy.
However, if you want to know how I got my opinion, I would suggest that you look at NYC, which has almost eliminated pedestrian fatalities by heavily enforcing its 25 MPH speed limit and similar traffic laws. Conversely, most drivers I see in suburban areas drive at least 5 MPH over the speed limit.
Of course not. “Speeds are correct on non-highways” doesn’t match the level of pedestrian fatalities in the US. He might be 100% correct about the highway speed, though I doubt it, since most highways (interstate/limited access) seem to be 65 or 70, except in urban areas.
It's a good thing that the pedestrian fatalities you are trying to cite very often happen due to someone speeding (that is a fact that you can corroborate with police data if you would like). If people don't obey a speed limit, you can't cite a consequence of their driving speed to say that the limit is too high.
Also, I have exactly as much data as everyone else is bringing to this discussion, including you and the GP comment, who have brought no relevant data either. This is just my opinion.
You’re the one who made the contention that suburban/non-highway speeds are just fine, despite high levels of pedestrian/non-car injury/death, not me.
And yes, I can absolutely say speed limits are too high, even if people are exceeding them. People drive the speed they feel safe, not the speed we want. So, we should design the roads to ensure people drive the speeds we want.
IE, a wide open 4-lane road is going to see speeds above 40mph, even if it’s posted at 20mph. Because it looks/feels safe from within a car. Yet, we keep building wide open 4-lane roads and wondering why everybody speeds and people keep getting run over.
I never said speeds are just fine. I said speed limits are fine, but being flagrantly violated. And yes, I agree that road design plays into this.
My experience with the design of many roads suggests that people generally take them far too fast regardless: they cut corners, don't stay fully in their lane, and do lots of other things that indicate they are driving far too fast.
Just anecdotally, I’ve experienced the same. The speed of traffic on highways is regularly 5-25 mph above the limit, and this mindset does translate to other types of road.
In North America, roads are usually built in the complete opposite way, with long straight roads and wide lanes, so the design speed is actually quite high -- even if that wasn't the intent. People go fast, because it feels safe to go that speed, but isn't, because there are pedestrians and turns. We then "fix" that shit road design by having low speed limits.
This video is all I think of when this discussion comes up now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc