EDIT: since apparently a bunch of people woke up with the wrong foot this morning or forgot to check the group they’re in:
This is a joke. Do not steal or vandalize speed enforcement cameras (or anything else for that matter). That’s against the law and you will likely get arrested.
If you’re addicted to crack or any other drugs, please seek professional help.
Even better solution though: the street at a school zone that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
What?
It’s simple. If you design the road to be wide, straight, with wide, clearly marked lanes, clear sides and a smooth surface, people will naturally be inclined to drive faster. This is based on experiences with forgiving design. For motorways, this is fine. But for residential neighbourhoods and school zones, it’s a bloodbath waiting to happen.
So out there, you do the exact opposite. Make the street so narrow that anything bigger than an average pickup truck barely fits in a lane. Make it out of brick and don’t mark the centre of the road. Surround the street with shrubs and other obstacles, and stick it full of sharp chicanes.
This is the deliberate inverse of forgiving design, called traffic calming.
Hey, I live on a road like that. It’s not even bricks, but good ol’ cobblestone. The cars also share it with a tram.
There’s a lot of pedestrians crossing. It’s a residential area with shops in the ground floor of all the buildings.
There’s multiple schools and kindergartens around, so they set the speed limit to 30km/h. Does that matter? No. People go 50-60 during the day and 70-80 at night. The only times that doesn’t happen is when the cops set up a mobile speed camera.
The road is fairly straight, I’ll give you that, but I guess they can’t just demolish a few kilometres of 100yrs old houses to make to road a bit winding.
I mean, if the
roadstreet takes up only part of the width of the right of way, you can do a lot with blocking off half theroadstreet and alternating which side every few dozen metres. No demolition required.Upon closer inspection, what you just described is a street, not a road.
Also, even with a narrower street, with strategically placed obstacles, you can convince drivers to zig-zag and reduce their speed that way.
I didn’t know there was a difference, I’ve been using them synonymously.
With the proposed changes traffic would have to wait constantly to let the other side pass. You would not only limit speed, but als throughput. If you just go slower because of speed cameras, the amount of traffic can stay the same.
There’s a lot of cars and lorries going through here. Sometimes a road/street that has a lot of traffic just goes through a fairly residential area and we kind of have to live with the fact.
And if you think that’s bad city planning call the eighteen hundreds and complain to these people.
There’s a difference. A road is meant to be a fast connection between points at the ends. This calls for forgiving design and higher speeds.
Meanwhile, a street is meant to be for allowing access to the nearby land. That warrants lower speeds, and the expectation that anyone can be on any of the sides as they see necessary. A street should function less like a vehicle artery, and more like an outdoor room.
Notice that these are incompatible uses. North American traffic engineers clearly didn’t, allowing main streets to become the main thoroughfare, i.e. the main roads through an area as well. This produces the most dangerous type of transportation infrastructure: the stroad. Which is both meant to be a fast connection AND access to the nearby land, and in doing so fails at both.
If this stretch of car infrastructure you were discussing is supposed to be a street, vehicle throughput should probably be one of the last priorities, and vehicles are better off on a road a few blocks over.
Firetrucks? Ambulance?
Not an issue in Europe. Though granted the US would probably need to replace their fire trucks with sanely-sized ones. You also don’t need to haul a big-ass ladder in a low-density area what’s your plan use it to do a header into a suburban pool.
Regarding response time absence of gridlock will be more important than the last hundred metres on a residential street, consider investing in public transportation, walkable cities, and generally everything that abolishes owning and using a car being mandatory.
nah fuck brick roads. the rest sure. not brick. dangerous for panick braking (less traction), wears iunt tires and suspension prematurely
Main roads shouldn’t be brick, but local residential streets certainly should. The speed limit should be 30 km/h or less anyway, and in a well-designed road network they should only make up a tiny portion of your overall drive, so wearing tyres and suspension isn’t an issue.
Relevant Not Just Bikes.
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Relevant Not Just Bikes
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Another relevant Not Just Bikes
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Another relevant Not Just Bikes
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
“Take this road that’s in good condition and spend public money rebuilding it over months instead of installing a camera today to push drivers to be responsible.”
Essentially, yes.
Besides, speed cameras, especially in NA, enforce by punishment. Punishment that some people are unable to afford, because for some reason they coddle billionaires while letting a fifth of their citizens rot in the gutter.
Meanwhile, a traffic calmed school zone enforces proactively. Are you sure you’d like to risk scratching your brand new $50k truck’s pristine paintjob? A properly traffic calmed street will force drivers to face that question, and in many cases, they’ll answer the question with “no”, and slow down. Mission accomplished.
Punishment that your don’t need to pay if your just respect the legal speed. We’re not talking about someone stealing food because they can’t afford to eat, we’re talking about someone driving a car and being unable to get their foot off the gas pedal for a bit. Your reaction to that is “People shouldn’t take their responsibility to respect the law, it’s the state that should spend money to make it so they don’t want to drive like morons!” while ignoring the fact that speed cameras are proven to be effective at keeping people under the sites limit and cost way less than just rebuilding roads. Add to that the fact that your solution means years or even decades of people driving too fast for safety while roads are getting rebuilt based on their speed limit and there’s nothing to enforce the speed limit in the meantime because “speed cameras aren’t the solution”.
If you’re unable to slow down just because the road is wide enough that you feel safe driving fast then you’ve got no business owning a car.
Counterpoint:
How often do you think most people watch their speed gauges?
You and I might do so regularly, but you sure as hell cannot say that for sure about every other person on the road.
Furthermore, how obvious is the speed limit?
I can tell you with certainty that, outside of a few, mostly European, places, this may be unclear. North American traffic engineers happily design roads with speed limits anywhere between 40 and 80 km/h, with no changes to the cross-sectional geometry of the (st-) road.
Systemic speeding because of misguided road design is more common than you’d like to admit. And a few cameras probably only do so much to fix that.
The speed limit needs to be indicated in order to be valid so that’s a completely ridiculous point you’re trying to make.
If people don’t pay attention to their driving they need to be penalized for it because no matter the road design, they’ll commit infractions and no matter the road design, speed limits need to be enforced otherwise they become suggestions.
See another of my comments with sources proving that speed cameras do reduce speeding by a wide margin, proving that drivers pay enough attention to their speed that when they fear they might be penalized for speeding, they slow down.
And putting up signs and cameras literally only does so much to convince people to slow down on wide, straight roads. How likely is the average driver in your area to speed? I can assure you, half of the road users are worse than that.
If we’re going to start pointing to other discussions, make it as easy to find your point as you can. Case in point, what I’m talking about.
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Case in point, what I’m talking about.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
“How likely is it that drivers are speeding?”
Much more likely if there’s nothing to punish them for doing so.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/7705481
Not Just Bikes isn’t the fucking second coming off Christ, you need to push your reflection a bit farther than his message.
You never replied to the “Ok, but what about between now and when all the roads have been redesigned?” part, weird right? That’s decades and trillions of dollars you’re saying we should spend to reach a solution, so, what happens in the meantime?
What’s your REALISTIC solution that works NOW and can be QUICKLY applied EVERYWHERE?
And “realistic solutioins that work now and can be quickly applied everywhere” are far too easily quick fixes. And nothing is as permanent as a quick fix.
Besides, at least one of your sources is a Canadian car journalist, someone who’s probably personally invested in sucking GM’s metaphorical dick.
And let’s also face it, Canada, a country where a city of half a million people was “too small for a rapid transit network,” while cities a third its size have about as much, if not more, absolute track mileage and ridership on their tram network than Toronto.
Who’s the biased one here, mister pot, accusing the kettle he’s black?