Or we could build our roads so that people can't comfortably drive 100MPH with zero feeling of danger. I've seen people drag racing on residential streets because they are 50 feet wide with clear zones on each side. We need more than just fancy gadgets. We also need traffic calming.
> Or we could build our roads so that people can't comfortably drive 100MPH with zero feeling of danger.
What about emergencies? If cops, firefighters or ambulances need to get somewhere quick?
> I've seen people drag racing on residential streets because they are 50 feet wide with clear zones on each side.
People drag race in residential areas because they feel they can do so with impunity. If politicians decided to take on this problem head on, we can solve it easily. Make drag racing and noise pollution with cars/motorcycles/etc in residential areas a serious crime ( that includes prison time ). Problem solved.
Ambulances do not go 100mph, and cops almost never do that unless they are chasing somebody who is also going very fast
Drag racing is unfortunately impossible to stop with force because we lack the political will to do anything like that in California. Narrowing streets and making it difficult to race or do donuts is more politically realistic
Or perhaps we could figure out a way to provide an accessible, legal venue for those activities. Like how skateboarding was a crime for a while (or still is??).
There are plenty of legal venues, and they are popular and widely used. The problem is that the value participants get comes from doing it in the city. It's not the same if they aren't rebelling
I used to volunteer at a race track. The amount of bureaucratic shit to even get your car on the track makes it not worth it to most people, myself included.
Used to find back corners of industrial parks to have fun. Cops were cool with it. More than a few were there off duty doing the same.
I've gone to drag strips and autocross events in more than one US state and the extent of "bureaucratic shit" was roughly "Do you have a driver's license and a helmet? Is the car leaking fluids? Sign here that you won't sue us." I have the impression things are a bit tighter for road courses.
I dealt with tech inspections and people would try to go on the track with worn out brakes and suspension all the time. Which is dumb but. So are people.
Even getting to that point means you've gone through the local amateur licence process, shown up to training days, etc.
You have to prove to a bunch of gatekeeping boomers you deserve to race.
A quick look around the web suggests you can do high performance driving events on serious race tracks with no experience at all. You may be required to do some laps with an instructor in the car and they have tight restrictions on passing. They'll probably want to check that your car isn't falling apart for obvious reasons.
If you want to do wheel to wheel racing with other drivers, then there's a license requirement involving a couple days of training with a four digit price tag.
Maybe we have different thresholds for what counts as "bureaucratic shit", but there seem to be some good options to drive fast under controlled conditions and compare your results to others. The most exciting and dangerous versions of it have some gatekeeping and I imagine most of the participants prefer it that way.
When I was stationed in Sacramento I saw a few neighborhoods that tackled this physically and it worked more effectively than I had assumed. They installed double and sometimes triple undulations think smooth short speed bumps that exponentially amplify lift when traveling over them over the speed limit. If traveling over them at the speed limit they are barely noticeable. Speed in a vehicle low to the ground most of the modded street race cars and it will wreck the under carriage, suspension, other things. I've seen it rip the exhaust system, undercarriage lights, spoilers / diffusers right off. Emergency vehicles did not appear to be affected.
> They installed double and sometimes triple undulations think smooth short speed bumps that exponentially amplify lift when traveling over them over the speed limit.
You must have dumb drag racers where you live but then again, most drag racers are dumb to begin with. Our drag racers remember where these speed bumps are and just adjust to them. You literally hear these morons slow down and rev up again in the middle of the night.
Frankly, it's the noise that's the biggest issue with me. I wouldn't care that much if they raced quietly. I'd prefer extremely heavy fines, loss of license and even prison for anyone causing excessive noise pollution in residential neighborhoods. Especially at night.
Multi-use paths, bus lanes, and bike lanes are excellent for emergency vehicles. Also, generally speaking, emergency vehicles aren't supposed to speed. A lot of ambulances have speed governors to prevent going too fast. Also, a lot of the streets where you would use traffic calming are your destination. By the time you hit the traffic calming you are already there pretty much.
Traffic calming is a recent term I've seen which seems to mean do things that won't fix any of the outlier behavior we don't like. In Seattle they have "safe streets" where people should only drive on them for local traffic.... So the streets will still have cars on them.
These ideas are ridiculously ineffective and sometimes actively annoying for people who live there. You want to reduce speed? Add speed bumps.
Speed bumps are a type of traffic calming, but traffic calming can include a variety of other techniques that can have other benefits. For example, extending sidewalks in residential areas or adding protective bollards to bike lanes - both encourage drivers to slow down by reducing the size of the lane.
You’re being by downvoted but I’m not sure why (though I can guess). Anyway, you might be happy to know that speed bumps are what is referred to as a traffic calming device; it might seem like an odd new term but it is a normal term in traffic engineering.
Mode filters are a great way to fix this problem. No one will use a private street as a through road if they can't get anywhere outside the neighborhood. Bonus points if you make it so emergency vehicles can get through them.
Speed bumps are a boon for auto maintenance shops. They force cars to go 10mph or more under the limit to avoid damage. And they greatly affect emergency vehicles.
Build the people so they don't do 100mph in a residential street.
Yes, but that’s a do both situation. Many cars are sold which can exceed 150% of the highest speed limit anywhere in the state, and while there are hard problems in designing speed limiters (e.g. urban interstate sections with GPS bounce) it’s pretty much trivial to say that the advanced computer in your new car can refuse to go over 75mph anywhere in the state if California, or reasonable caps in urban cores where there’s no legal place to go >45mph, etc.
The problem here is that changing built infrastructure is expensive and challenging: the most aggressive drivers will fight every change tooth and nail, there will be impassioned arguments about freedom (except for the freedom to be a pedestrian and live, of course) and you’ll hear a million fantasies about how you sometimes need to LARP being an ambulance driver during emergencies in highly improbable situations where driving 90mph to the hospital is a) medically necessary and b) doesn’t result in more injuries. We are seeing improvements but that’s a huge lift, whereas California telling car manufacturers to enable a feature they already have much of the hardware and data for from all of the assist/navigation/self-driving work has the very convenient aspect of not requiring thousands of CalTrans and local projects to be planned, survive approval, and be built to start saving lives.
What I would like is to pair this with mandatory improvements as part of routine maintenance: every urban road resurfacing, ADA upgrade, etc. project could include safety improvements so those don’t require expensive new projects which might involve ripping up roads worked on just a few years earlier.
One example I like are continuous sidewalks / raised crosswalks where cars have to go up an incline to pass through a pedestrian space or bulbing out corners so drivers have to slow down. You can’t easily deploy those everywhere but there are a ton of areas where it’d be easy and important around schools, parks, etc. and if you could flip it so the planners would have to get an exception approved _not_ to use a safe design, cities could roll that into normal maintenance and be much safer a decade later.
> Many cars are sold which can exceed 150% of the highest speed limit anywhere in the state
Is there any popular new car that can't do 106 mph on level ground, no wind? I can find a few extra-wheezy cars with published top speeds lower than that, but even a Prius, base Civic, or base Corolla can exceed 110 mph.
I thought there were some 75mph zones in the high desert but it’s been almost two decades since I last drove there. In any case, though, that’s basically my thought: there’s literally nowhere in the entire state where you can legally drive over 75mph on a public road, so it’s kind of nuts that most drivers can easily go 100-160mph and we just say “don’t do this very easy thing, that’d be dangerous”.
Raise the speed limits such that they're closer to the actual typical speed of traffic, which will reduce the dangers posed to (and by) the "I drive the speed limit" crowd.
It’s not more dangerous. It’s clearly limited: your driveway or a roundabout isn’t dangerous, but you don’t speed because it’s not super wide and you don’t expect it to be completely clear of people or things you don’t want to hit.
Most traffic calming measures are similar: break up long sight lines, narrow the lanes, and tighten the corners so people look at the road and think “I’m driving past homes where pedestrians are” rather than “freeway, time to see if I can avoid dropping under the speed limit the whole way!”
The way to reduce speeds is not to make the road more dangerous but rather to signal the expected speed correctly. The article a sibling commenter linked makes this point:
> [...] The premise is simple: drivers will make occasional mistakes—veer a bit out of their lane, fail to brake hard enough, etc.—-and if the street is wide, with high visibility in all directions, and free of immediate obstacles such as trees and fences, those mistakes won’t be catastrophic. The problem: this street feels too forgiving to a driver. Too safe and comfortable. So drivers speed up. The engineers didn’t account for this aspect of human psychology.
Drivers behave as expected when they can't see around obstacles, the lane feels tight, and there are curves and other features that reduce visibility. These roads aren't inherently more dangerous, they just give drivers less margin for taking excessive risks.
Yup! Bonus points if you can make the road feel more dangerous without actually making it more dangerous. Obstacles that damage paint and bumpers or make disturbing noises without hurting occupants are great. Stuff like K-rails and Flexi-posts are perfect for this. Making roads curvy so that drivers have to maneuver. Making turns sharper and getting rid of slip lanes too.
I know it might seem like a radical idea but we could try something very strange … what if we prosecuted people? I mean I know we are led to believe people only commit crimes like this to get bread for their families but I think we could change sone behavior with just accountability (I know, it’s a kind word f kryptonite). It’s pretty odd for communities to appear helpless because of a loss of common sense.
I had a friend who would be caught regularly and ticketed. Suspended license and everything. He still drove everywhere and did so like a D-Bag. I love the idea of making traffic enforcement way more strict, but it would be better if we could just give people like him viable alternatives to driving and make it impossible to drive in such a manner using good street design.
Imagine if the entertainment system / phone turned off when you hit the limit and all you could see or hear was the navigation if active.
In an actual emergency situation, you’d accept that in a heartbeat but I think it’d be surprisingly effective for all of the people who just crank up the workout music and try to get to work fast enough not to be late.
Around town? Absolutely (though I would still oppose a law that mandates it, despite having bought a car with a configurable feature of that sort).
On a highway that's posted 55 mph but designed for 80+? Beyond useless. And also the reason I have disabled the tone in the car that I did buy with a similar feature, because there are plenty of 80 mph freeways around me that are posted 55 and I'm not going to deal with hearing that tone every time I drive 65 on such a freeway.
Or once every time you cross from 64 to 65 in a 55 and from 74 to 75 in a 65 (which is how I read it)? That's getting turned off/disabled (or may perversely encourage drivers to vary their speed from 78-82 instead of 74-78).
Does this also come with a requirement that manufacturers provide free updates in perpetuity to the car's internal map of streets with speed limits?
Changes to roads and speed limits do happen occasionally, and it would drive me crazy to have my car complain I'm speeding when I'm really following the new speed limit for that road.
Google maps was putting my speed in red today because it still had a road marked as 35 MPH, that had been re-rated to 50 MPH after construction ended.
Honestly it seems dystopian. Like requiring a breathalyzer before you can turn the key in every car. Treatment like this is supposed to be reserved for those who lost their freedom through egregious actions -- not the entirety of society.
To be honest, having a breathalyzer on every car wouldn't be a horrible thing. This thing just pops up a warning like your TPMS sensors, it doesn't prevent you from going faster.
Fairly sure the way it will identify speed limits is based on the last sign the cameras have identified. I had a rental car that showed the speed limits in this manner and it was pretty nifty. "Low tech" yet high tech.
How do the cars know what the speed limit is? Is the state providing this data in a standard format that cars are expected to download? Are they using transponders on road signs to send signals to cars to tell them what the limit is?
As far as I am aware, everything is turned on. I know the EyeSight feature is on. I will have to take another look at the user manual and see if I am missing something.
I’ve lost track the number of times I’ve exited a construction and not known what the hell the speed limit is because previously it changed somewhere within the zone before the construction started.
Or worse, a total lack of signs on rural roads.
Just had a case today in WI where I left one road at 55 MPH onto a county road, and had no idea that the new limit was 45 until we checked Google Maps.
Yet another reason to avoid buying a "smart" (read: new) car, in addition to them selling your driving habits to data brokers, having cameras that record the drivers and passengers inside, and tracking your location at all times.
I guess I'm destined to become a classic car aficionado by necessity.
I think a better solution would be to re-evaluate how we set speed limits.
Clearly, the design of the road has an incredible influence over what speeds drivers feel comfortable - and uncomfortable - going.
There is a road near me (SWFL) where everyone routinely goes about 50 MPH, despite a 35MPH limit. The road has three lanes on each side, ditches on either side, a wide median, and dedicated turn lanes to get on and off. It's uncomfortable - and often dangerous - to follow the posted speed.
For any major road, it seems like the best approach would be to build it, then test what speed the majority of traffic goes on it before setting the limit. Get the average speed, add 5, and post the sign. If the speed is too high for the type of road, it should be redesigned. Surely it'd only take a couple of tries at the process before we figured out how to make a road where most people would drive the speed we intend.
--
As for electronic speed monitoring, there is another nearby road that's posted at 50 MPH that google maps insists is still 35 MPH. If electronic speed monitoring goes to its natural extent, that sort of mistake could result in hefty, unjustified fines or even jail time.
In any case, I have a feeling that this is a band-aid solution that will further discourage the average consumer from purchasing new cars.
The problem with that approach is that it only considers drivers, and it lets the aggressive drivers influence the speed limit by bullying safer drivers. Outside of freeways, we shouldn’t dedicate millions of dollars in public space to private car drivers, so we should be looking at the rest of the community and ensuring that cities aren’t built around the idea that everyone needs a private vehicle. That’s a financial hardship for many people (where I live, cars are neck and neck with food as a household expense, behind only housing) and it freezes out the roughly ⅓ of the population who can’t drive. It also locks in significant health and environmental costs and we don’t tax driving to pay for those.
We absolutely should consider the entirety of drivers and their existing behaviors when we design roads, instead of wishing they would behave differently.
Moreover, reducing accommodation for motor vehicles in cities leaves the non-urban population behind - and neglects that private vehicles aren't the only users of the roadway. Truck deliveries, garbage collection, and mail become a lot more difficult if roadways are reduced.
Note that I’m not saying we don’t consider drivers at all - only that we look at the needs of the entire city rather than saying anyone who doesn’t drive doesn’t matter or, especially, that people who live there are less important than faster commutes for non-residents as was the case for much of the 20th century.
> Moreover, reducing accommodation for motor vehicles in cities leaves the non-urban population behind - and neglects that private vehicles aren't the only users of the roadway. Truck deliveries, garbage collection, and mail become a lot more difficult if roadways are reduced.
Non-urban drivers shouldn’t have primacy over residents just because they chose to live further away and refuse to use transit. Moreover, there’s a fundamental flaw in the assumption that speed limits are the primary limiting factor there: we actually know from decades of studies that they’re slowed by other cars, and adding lanes tends to make things worse by incentivizing more car trips. Boston famously spent enormous amounts of money on the Big Dig - which the MBTA is still struggling to pay off - and the net impact was a slight time savings for suburban commuters for about six months, after which traffic was worse than before because more people were driving. Getting those people onto trains would be far more effective and cheaper.
Similarly, delivery and garbage trucks aren’t affected at all by calming measures because those drivers aren’t flooring it all the way downtown - they’re stopping too often. What does help is reducing congestion and simplifying roads because that makes their routes more predictable (they don’t have the option of picking an alternate route) – if we wanted to help them, we’d ban unprotected left turns or reserve one parking spot per block for deliveries.
It sounds like you're working with a base assumption that increasing usage of cars is bad.
My base assumption is that moving people around is good. Freedom of movement and time-efficient movement. The car reigns supreme over trains, planes, and buses in those terms.
> the net impact was a slight time savings for suburban commuters for about six months, after which traffic was worse than before because more people were driving.
By the sound of it, more people were able to get where they were going because of the the Big Dig.
> Getting those people onto trains would be far more effective and cheaper
A breakdown of the numbers here would be great, but I'm not sure how much more time either of us want to spend lol. I like trains, but I'm cautious about them because they generally can't take people directly to an end destination the way an independent vehicle can. The US has also generally failed to use rail in a way that could replace cars in a meaningful way, despite rail having a decades-long head-start over the automobile.
> Similarly, delivery and garbage trucks aren’t affected at all by calming measures
I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that you wanted to remove or replace roads in cities to make way for alternative transportation. That's based on the statement in your original comment:
> Outside of freeways, we shouldn’t dedicate millions of dollars in public space to private car drivers,
I was not referring to traffic calming measures when I said that would be a logistical nightmare. I more meant that private cars share common infrastructure with a number of critical services; reducing their share of public space would harm those other services.
Look, I grew up in California suburbs where car culture is the only culture, but I’ve also looked at the data enough to know that the status quo isn’t working. It’s clear that cars do not scale even if you spend amounts of money we can’t sustain, they have significant negative impacts on people who live near busy roads, and the planet isn’t exactly getting any cooler.
More to the point of the article, we know that every year forty thousand Americans are killed by unsafe operation of vehicles and at least hundreds of thousands are injured, usually with permanent life altering impacts. Experts estimate that there is close to a trillion dollar annual gap between what drivers pay and the cost to society for the status quo: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...
So the question from my perspective is how we improve quality of life for everyone while reducing costs for everyone, and that means less car trips which also improves the car trips which are necessary. For example, emergency vehicles are most commonly blocked by private cars. If we care about improvement there, getting more people to walk, bike, or take transit helps everyone because a fire truck or ambulance isn’t routinely stuck in traffic. The same applies to safety for children, the ability for the blind or elderly to function independently, ease of delivery, etc.: every single part of urban life improves if there isn’t the assumption that everyone in the city needs ~120 square feet of space to move themselves around, and the heavy equipment is reserved for the small percentage of trips which actually need it.
> Look, I grew up in California suburbs where car culture is the only culture, but I’ve also looked at the data enough to know that the status quo isn’t working.
Then you would also be 100% aware your desire for people to walk and take public transit is entirely at odds with reality. It does not work in suburbs or rural areas. The only place these ideas work in reality is in dense urban areas...
First, you’ll note that I specified urban a lot. Transit definitely doesn’t work for everyone but it’ll work where the majority of the population is.
Second, transit not working in most American suburbs is an artificial choice. Transit works well in the railroad suburb I live in now but the white flight-era suburbs were intentionally designed not to work for transit or pedestrian access and while later designs might have been less intentional about it, low density is a challenge. That low density is also what makes them financially unstable and is creating challenges for an aging population, so I wouldn’t treat it as evidence of strong demand rather than people picking the most heavily subsidized option. California has had a huge boom in ADU construction when it was streamlined, revealing a great deal of market demand for density which was previously stymied.
When you work 40+ miles away from your house - no, suburban (and urban) public transit simply do not work. It is a fiction public transit can solve transportation problems in the US.
Optimistically, this rule could create tighter feedback loops due to increased community engagement with planners so that databases get updated more quickly and speed limits are perhaps dialed in to match real conditions--the mismatched limits that you mention might have been established with expectation of a neighborhood buildout that never happened, or may be an oversight in low population areas--or they may be there for good reasons.
As it stands, speed limits are not usually enforced and are basically ignored by drivers, so (optimistically) this may encourage communities to make them more realistic limits, as opposed to suggestions.
> Get the average speed, add 5, and post the sign.
A common method for setting speed limits in the past was the 85th percentile speed.
I agree that changes to road design are a good idea when a significant number of people drive too fast, with "too fast" being determined by risk factors that are not necessarily obvious to drivers. Adding curb extensions, chicanes, or narrowing lanes by painting new lines are some inexpensive options for encouraging slower driving.
I'm against nannies built into cars or heavy punitive enforcement.
> There is a road near me (SWFL) where everyone routinely goes about 50 MPH, despite a 35MPH limit.
You say this but in SoCal I see vastly many more people driving 35 in a 50 than 50 in a 35. Which is... Probably what causes a lot of the speeding problems in the first place and is, frankly, vastly more dangerous because people set expectations around the signs.
Ah yes, everyone knows that when people ignore existing laws, the correct response is to just create more new laws. Now it's double-illegal to speed! Ha, that'll teach 'em!
In all seriousness - there are vastly more effective ways to deal with the very small subset of the population that speeds recklessly than to install a "frustration chime" into every new vehicle that happens to be sold in California.
If you're going to use tech to warn drivers not to speed, why not use that same technology to prevent the car from speeding? Theres probably some instances where the ability to speed is a safety feature (eg, needing to exceed the speed limit while overtaking due to oncoming traffic), but maybe the tech can somehow cater for these instances. Regardless, I suspect the danger this introduces is less than the danger caused by speeding in general.
I’m sure that’s the second part of the plan. You don’t do both at the same time, as the law would be unlikely to pass. Like with all unpopular policies you first start with something which is relatively acceptable, then you turn up the screws. Boiling the frog and all that. Story as old as time.
I think fixing the DUI issue is more pressing than speeding.
They want to make a breathalyzer mandatory for anyone with a dui.
Is there a reason why they can't nip the problem with drinking to begin with.
Use the same laws they use for buying and owning a gun to be mimicked for alcohol purchases, etc - thats stopped alot of bad things from happening already in California. Alcohol is also unhealthy for you - cancer - so it would also be two birds with one stone.
90 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadWhat about emergencies? If cops, firefighters or ambulances need to get somewhere quick?
> I've seen people drag racing on residential streets because they are 50 feet wide with clear zones on each side.
People drag race in residential areas because they feel they can do so with impunity. If politicians decided to take on this problem head on, we can solve it easily. Make drag racing and noise pollution with cars/motorcycles/etc in residential areas a serious crime ( that includes prison time ). Problem solved.
Drag racing is unfortunately impossible to stop with force because we lack the political will to do anything like that in California. Narrowing streets and making it difficult to race or do donuts is more politically realistic
Used to find back corners of industrial parks to have fun. Cops were cool with it. More than a few were there off duty doing the same.
I dealt with tech inspections and people would try to go on the track with worn out brakes and suspension all the time. Which is dumb but. So are people.
Even getting to that point means you've gone through the local amateur licence process, shown up to training days, etc.
You have to prove to a bunch of gatekeeping boomers you deserve to race.
If you want to do wheel to wheel racing with other drivers, then there's a license requirement involving a couple days of training with a four digit price tag.
Maybe we have different thresholds for what counts as "bureaucratic shit", but there seem to be some good options to drive fast under controlled conditions and compare your results to others. The most exciting and dangerous versions of it have some gatekeeping and I imagine most of the participants prefer it that way.
The flow of traffic is always the safest speed. NHTSA and German authorites have papers on this.
It is possible to physically slow cars down with narrower roads, speed bumps, one lane chicanes, etc. It works. Very well.
Four lane split highway with a 30mph sign next to a police station? That's a speed trap and everyone knows it.
You must have dumb drag racers where you live but then again, most drag racers are dumb to begin with. Our drag racers remember where these speed bumps are and just adjust to them. You literally hear these morons slow down and rev up again in the middle of the night.
Frankly, it's the noise that's the biggest issue with me. I wouldn't care that much if they raced quietly. I'd prefer extremely heavy fines, loss of license and even prison for anyone causing excessive noise pollution in residential neighborhoods. Especially at night.
These ideas are ridiculously ineffective and sometimes actively annoying for people who live there. You want to reduce speed? Add speed bumps.
Build the people so they don't do 100mph in a residential street.
The problem here is that changing built infrastructure is expensive and challenging: the most aggressive drivers will fight every change tooth and nail, there will be impassioned arguments about freedom (except for the freedom to be a pedestrian and live, of course) and you’ll hear a million fantasies about how you sometimes need to LARP being an ambulance driver during emergencies in highly improbable situations where driving 90mph to the hospital is a) medically necessary and b) doesn’t result in more injuries. We are seeing improvements but that’s a huge lift, whereas California telling car manufacturers to enable a feature they already have much of the hardware and data for from all of the assist/navigation/self-driving work has the very convenient aspect of not requiring thousands of CalTrans and local projects to be planned, survive approval, and be built to start saving lives.
What I would like is to pair this with mandatory improvements as part of routine maintenance: every urban road resurfacing, ADA upgrade, etc. project could include safety improvements so those don’t require expensive new projects which might involve ripping up roads worked on just a few years earlier.
One example I like are continuous sidewalks / raised crosswalks where cars have to go up an incline to pass through a pedestrian space or bulbing out corners so drivers have to slow down. You can’t easily deploy those everywhere but there are a ton of areas where it’d be easy and important around schools, parks, etc. and if you could flip it so the planners would have to get an exception approved _not_ to use a safe design, cities could roll that into normal maintenance and be much safer a decade later.
Is there any popular new car that can't do 106 mph on level ground, no wind? I can find a few extra-wheezy cars with published top speeds lower than that, but even a Prius, base Civic, or base Corolla can exceed 110 mph.
Edit since there are multiple similar replies: I took parent comment to include freeways.
Most traffic calming measures are similar: break up long sight lines, narrow the lanes, and tighten the corners so people look at the road and think “I’m driving past homes where pedestrians are” rather than “freeway, time to see if I can avoid dropping under the speed limit the whole way!”
> [...] The premise is simple: drivers will make occasional mistakes—veer a bit out of their lane, fail to brake hard enough, etc.—-and if the street is wide, with high visibility in all directions, and free of immediate obstacles such as trees and fences, those mistakes won’t be catastrophic. The problem: this street feels too forgiving to a driver. Too safe and comfortable. So drivers speed up. The engineers didn’t account for this aspect of human psychology.
Drivers behave as expected when they can't see around obstacles, the lane feels tight, and there are curves and other features that reduce visibility. These roads aren't inherently more dangerous, they just give drivers less margin for taking excessive risks.
In an actual emergency situation, you’d accept that in a heartbeat but I think it’d be surprisingly effective for all of the people who just crank up the workout music and try to get to work fast enough not to be late.
On a highway that's posted 55 mph but designed for 80+? Beyond useless. And also the reason I have disabled the tone in the car that I did buy with a similar feature, because there are plenty of 80 mph freeways around me that are posted 55 and I'm not going to deal with hearing that tone every time I drive 65 on such a freeway.
Or once every time you cross from 64 to 65 in a 55 and from 74 to 75 in a 65 (which is how I read it)? That's getting turned off/disabled (or may perversely encourage drivers to vary their speed from 78-82 instead of 74-78).
Changes to roads and speed limits do happen occasionally, and it would drive me crazy to have my car complain I'm speeding when I'm really following the new speed limit for that road.
Honestly it seems dystopian. Like requiring a breathalyzer before you can turn the key in every car. Treatment like this is supposed to be reserved for those who lost their freedom through egregious actions -- not the entirety of society.
I’ve lost track the number of times I’ve exited a construction and not known what the hell the speed limit is because previously it changed somewhere within the zone before the construction started.
Or worse, a total lack of signs on rural roads.
Just had a case today in WI where I left one road at 55 MPH onto a county road, and had no idea that the new limit was 45 until we checked Google Maps.
I guess I'm destined to become a classic car aficionado by necessity.
Clearly, the design of the road has an incredible influence over what speeds drivers feel comfortable - and uncomfortable - going.
There is a road near me (SWFL) where everyone routinely goes about 50 MPH, despite a 35MPH limit. The road has three lanes on each side, ditches on either side, a wide median, and dedicated turn lanes to get on and off. It's uncomfortable - and often dangerous - to follow the posted speed.
For any major road, it seems like the best approach would be to build it, then test what speed the majority of traffic goes on it before setting the limit. Get the average speed, add 5, and post the sign. If the speed is too high for the type of road, it should be redesigned. Surely it'd only take a couple of tries at the process before we figured out how to make a road where most people would drive the speed we intend.
--
As for electronic speed monitoring, there is another nearby road that's posted at 50 MPH that google maps insists is still 35 MPH. If electronic speed monitoring goes to its natural extent, that sort of mistake could result in hefty, unjustified fines or even jail time.
In any case, I have a feeling that this is a band-aid solution that will further discourage the average consumer from purchasing new cars.
We absolutely should consider the entirety of drivers and their existing behaviors when we design roads, instead of wishing they would behave differently.
Moreover, reducing accommodation for motor vehicles in cities leaves the non-urban population behind - and neglects that private vehicles aren't the only users of the roadway. Truck deliveries, garbage collection, and mail become a lot more difficult if roadways are reduced.
"Inappropriate speed is responsible for 20 to 30% of all fatal road crashes." from https://www.itf-oecd.org/speed-crash-risk
Also, due to kinetic energy increasing with speed, collisions are worse, in addition to being more likely.
> Moreover, reducing accommodation for motor vehicles in cities leaves the non-urban population behind - and neglects that private vehicles aren't the only users of the roadway. Truck deliveries, garbage collection, and mail become a lot more difficult if roadways are reduced.
Non-urban drivers shouldn’t have primacy over residents just because they chose to live further away and refuse to use transit. Moreover, there’s a fundamental flaw in the assumption that speed limits are the primary limiting factor there: we actually know from decades of studies that they’re slowed by other cars, and adding lanes tends to make things worse by incentivizing more car trips. Boston famously spent enormous amounts of money on the Big Dig - which the MBTA is still struggling to pay off - and the net impact was a slight time savings for suburban commuters for about six months, after which traffic was worse than before because more people were driving. Getting those people onto trains would be far more effective and cheaper.
Similarly, delivery and garbage trucks aren’t affected at all by calming measures because those drivers aren’t flooring it all the way downtown - they’re stopping too often. What does help is reducing congestion and simplifying roads because that makes their routes more predictable (they don’t have the option of picking an alternate route) – if we wanted to help them, we’d ban unprotected left turns or reserve one parking spot per block for deliveries.
My base assumption is that moving people around is good. Freedom of movement and time-efficient movement. The car reigns supreme over trains, planes, and buses in those terms.
> the net impact was a slight time savings for suburban commuters for about six months, after which traffic was worse than before because more people were driving.
By the sound of it, more people were able to get where they were going because of the the Big Dig.
> Getting those people onto trains would be far more effective and cheaper
A breakdown of the numbers here would be great, but I'm not sure how much more time either of us want to spend lol. I like trains, but I'm cautious about them because they generally can't take people directly to an end destination the way an independent vehicle can. The US has also generally failed to use rail in a way that could replace cars in a meaningful way, despite rail having a decades-long head-start over the automobile.
> Similarly, delivery and garbage trucks aren’t affected at all by calming measures
I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that you wanted to remove or replace roads in cities to make way for alternative transportation. That's based on the statement in your original comment:
> Outside of freeways, we shouldn’t dedicate millions of dollars in public space to private car drivers,
I was not referring to traffic calming measures when I said that would be a logistical nightmare. I more meant that private cars share common infrastructure with a number of critical services; reducing their share of public space would harm those other services.
More to the point of the article, we know that every year forty thousand Americans are killed by unsafe operation of vehicles and at least hundreds of thousands are injured, usually with permanent life altering impacts. Experts estimate that there is close to a trillion dollar annual gap between what drivers pay and the cost to society for the status quo: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...
So the question from my perspective is how we improve quality of life for everyone while reducing costs for everyone, and that means less car trips which also improves the car trips which are necessary. For example, emergency vehicles are most commonly blocked by private cars. If we care about improvement there, getting more people to walk, bike, or take transit helps everyone because a fire truck or ambulance isn’t routinely stuck in traffic. The same applies to safety for children, the ability for the blind or elderly to function independently, ease of delivery, etc.: every single part of urban life improves if there isn’t the assumption that everyone in the city needs ~120 square feet of space to move themselves around, and the heavy equipment is reserved for the small percentage of trips which actually need it.
Then you would also be 100% aware your desire for people to walk and take public transit is entirely at odds with reality. It does not work in suburbs or rural areas. The only place these ideas work in reality is in dense urban areas...
Second, transit not working in most American suburbs is an artificial choice. Transit works well in the railroad suburb I live in now but the white flight-era suburbs were intentionally designed not to work for transit or pedestrian access and while later designs might have been less intentional about it, low density is a challenge. That low density is also what makes them financially unstable and is creating challenges for an aging population, so I wouldn’t treat it as evidence of strong demand rather than people picking the most heavily subsidized option. California has had a huge boom in ADU construction when it was streamlined, revealing a great deal of market demand for density which was previously stymied.
As it stands, speed limits are not usually enforced and are basically ignored by drivers, so (optimistically) this may encourage communities to make them more realistic limits, as opposed to suggestions.
A common method for setting speed limits in the past was the 85th percentile speed.
I agree that changes to road design are a good idea when a significant number of people drive too fast, with "too fast" being determined by risk factors that are not necessarily obvious to drivers. Adding curb extensions, chicanes, or narrowing lanes by painting new lines are some inexpensive options for encouraging slower driving.
I'm against nannies built into cars or heavy punitive enforcement.
You say this but in SoCal I see vastly many more people driving 35 in a 50 than 50 in a 35. Which is... Probably what causes a lot of the speeding problems in the first place and is, frankly, vastly more dangerous because people set expectations around the signs.
In all seriousness - there are vastly more effective ways to deal with the very small subset of the population that speeds recklessly than to install a "frustration chime" into every new vehicle that happens to be sold in California.