view the rest of the comments
Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Why will every driver go over 20mph/30kph? Are they incapable of maintaining that speed? All school and community zones in my country are 30kph; are we wasting our time with those?
I'm a vision zero proponent, so I don't care about the number of collisions; I care about the number of fatal collisions first, serious injuries second, minor injuries third. So even if 20 mph maintains, or even increases collisions; so long as it reduces casualties, it's positive. Bumpers are replaceable; people are not. The AAA document you link even says a 10% reduction in mean speed reduces fatal crashes by ~34% in the executive summary.
Regarding the first point, drivers naturally trend towards the speed they "feel" is right. Also many modern cars practically idle faster than 20 once you get rolling.
Change the actual road to slow people down and reduce accidents.
I agree, but you are making excuses for bad driving. It's still their fault that they drive too fast.
Not excusing shit, I'm describing human behavior. Humans literally drift to the speed they think is right, by feel.
Don't assume intent.
But similarly, human behavior can be trained. We aren't NPCs. These bad drivers could be taught to drive at a safe speed regardless of the width of the street, through stricter education and enforcement. Pedestrians/cyclists/homes/businesses around the street -> drive slow, that should be an instinct.
I said "change the actual road"
Enforcement doesn't work for what I'm describing, without conscious effort, humans drift to the speed they think they need. Always. So whenever you try to policy it, you are asking folks to go against their nature.
Change the shape / characteristics of the road to change the speed people drive it.
As I said, I completely agree that changing the shape of the road is an important component of this solution.
Yes, I am asking the operators of deadly heavy machinery to put in a small amount of conscious effort to keep people safe. Why is that an impossible request?
No one in my state complies with the speed limits because they're ridiculously low for the design of the road. You have a road built to handle 90mph but you tell people to go 30mph? Yeah that ain't happening