314
85% Of Car Drivers Break 20mph Speed Limits, Reveals U.K.’s Department For Transport
(www.forbes.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
314 points (93.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
9806 readers
78 users here now
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
-
Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
-
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
-
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
-
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
-
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
-
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
-
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think a large part of it is inappropriately making 30 mph areas 20mph and also poor enforcement.
I live on a long wide 20mph road and I can't stand the people going at 40, 50 or even 60 or 70 mph at times. But I don't think my road should have been 20mph, it should have been 30mph. It seems it was easier to stick some 20mph signs up to say "we've done something" as a way of discouraging some people going at more rediculous speeds and hope most go at 30mph.
Instead what was needed was actual investment in the road - speed bumps, narrowing the road with choke points and passing points, physical rather than painted cycle lanes - that kind of thing.
Fortunately after years of pressure our road is now going to be in a LTZ (Low Traffic Zone). Both ends of my own long road are blocked off to allow pedestrians and cyclists only through, and my main road is being split into 3rds with X-junctions being turned into filters(Instead of X it's now > and < with no connection). If you're driving you can only turn into one side street while cyclists and pedestrians can pass through as normal. We've had a trial for a while and it's been very effective - my whole block has been split up with filters so you can't use it to pass through to reach the main roads around it - this has stopped the arseholes using my road as a shortcut and speeding at 60 mph.
People are still going at 30mph but the twisting and turning through the block means you can't really get up to anything more than that and also unless you're going to a house in the block it's pointless to even enter.
So while I abhor speeding, I would argue these stats reflect bad road management - over relying on 20mph speed limtis as a cheap alternative to actual road management and redeisgns which are expensive (and difficult in many parts of the UK with lots of very old and narrow streets inherited from previous eras).
Speed bumps are the worst possible solution, they often mean if you're in a conventional car you have to come to a near complete stop and if you're in a large SUV you can cross at 20mph. This reinforces the trend away from conventional cars to higher ride height vehicles which is a disaster for road safety (especially pedestrian and cyclist safety).
They do successfully slow down the flow of traffic (and also cause traffic to follow alternative paths, at least until speed bumps are saturated in the area) but it fucks up emergency vehicle access and damages cars (increases wear and tear). The other road design solutions (more narrow roads, inclusion of roundabouts, addition of choke points etc) all are equally as effective as humps at reducing speeders and diverting traffic away from roads (in some cases they are better) and have none of the negative consequences, speed humps should never be used imo.
The speed bumps are supposed to be tailored to the target speed. There's some 40 km/h streets in my city with regular speed bumps and they're perfectly fine because the speed bumps are designed for that speed. They're quite shallow compared to the kind of speed bump you'd see in a 20 km/h parking lot.
I've never seen or heard of this but I'm skeptical that there is any speed hump design that wouldn't be a negative for emergency services, increase wear and tear to vehicles that cross them and that wouldn't be less of an impact to lifted chassis vehicles. These problems are avoided by the other, better solutions so why are humps even a part of the conversation at all?
Sky bridges or tunnels for pedestrians. Reduce the need for people to actually cross the street, where possible.
That just makes walking more difficult for the benefit of drivers.
@PseudoSpock @BananaTrifleViolin, or we can design the road so driving at safe speeds is the intuitive choice.
Streets are for people and their daily activities. Roads are for getting to places quickly.