Fuck Cars

You’re suggesting they add even more potholes to motorways?

it's enforced by road design, and in some cases our desire to not murder children with our cars. call me autistic (I am) but I follow speed limits in residential areas even if the road is designed like a formula 1 track

There's a concept in road design that says the engineer must first determine the design speed, which is basically how fast they want traffic to be able to flow. This part of the process is generally not part of any public hearing or put to a vote by public officials - it is just decided on and then they move on to the next step.

There's also a prevailing concept in road design that seems to indicate that high traffic speeds are a design issue, but low speeds are an enforcement issue. The road is designed to accommodate the highest amount of traffic anticipated in the future without really thinking about if that's even a good fit for the area.

Once the road has been built to exacting standards (which means it is far too wide and flat,) the city steps in and slaps a speed limit on it, often at odds with the design speed.

When residents get worried about all the speeding cars, they petition the city for a traffic study to see if anything can be done. The engineers conducting the traffic study determine that the road is capable of handling higher speeds than the current limit, and so to cut down on speeding the recommendation is to increase the posted limit.

It's amazing to me how much influence the engineering team has on the design with basically no accountability. You can try to reduce speeding by putting up speed traps and police patrols, but at the end of the day people will drive as fast as they are comfortable with and that is often a result of the design of the road they are driving on.

Yea around here we have 4 or more lane highways with 60mph speed limits. You could almost double that safely if people actually used the lanes properly when not passing. Instead we have to deal with a mix of assholes going all different speeds trying to get around the people going 60 in the left lane and god help you of there's a cop around.

You may enjoy the YouTube channel, Road Guy Rob. He covers a lot of these issues and more. It's a niche channel for sure, but can be fascinating if you're into that kind of thing.

I can't really make sense of what you're saying. If the road is straight and wide but also has a low speed limit, that's not sending mixed signals. Rather, it's suggesting that you should drive slow even though your instinct tells you that you could drive quickly, presumably because there are either obstacles creating blind points that could lead to pedestrian or bicycle involved accidents, small children playing nearby, or cars turning onto or from side roads that you might strike if you're driving at the speed that your gut tells you is safe.

In other words, you shouldn't trust your gut when deciding how fast is safe on a road because your gut is often mistaken about the finer points of road design.

Also, you wrote that a slow driver would be an obstruction to other vehicles including trucks. I think you were wording that as a bad thing, but in reality it's a good thing. One reasonable driver can force a dozen bad drivers to slow down.

Speed bumps are the worst possible solution, they often mean if you're in a conventional car you have to come to a bear 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.

15% is not a hard success rate to beat but. This isn't dickriding self driving cars, that shit is never going to work without fucking everyone outside of a car over more, but that's kind of the point, the answer to this problem is not cars (any version)

@sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 Modern petrol cars contain lots of computers too.

Automatic enforcement, with the right to override it recorded in the black box to be used as evidence in crash cases, is a perfectly reasonable idea. But inevitably there will be bugs, just as there are in self-driving cars (especially the often dangerous "semi-autonomous" vehicles).

However there is a cheaper solution: Fixed, widespread speed cameras. Which right now are effectively banned in the UK, because the treasury confiscates the fines (local government pays the running costs, and therefore can't afford to run any).

While I understand there are usability issues, and design can help with that, if you're not able to drive your ton of metal safely and legally you shouldn't be driving it. If people expected to get caught, they'd drive slower.

The bottom line is speed limits are the law. And lower speed limits reduce the number of serious injuries dramatically and help to push people onto public transport. Although with old cars they increase emissions slightly; with modern hybrids they reduce them.

UK highways departments have had essentially zero budget for 2+ decades now. There's no funding to completely retrofit every single residential street to match the new signage. Most of them are already incredibly narrow and tight compared to your average North American street.

Another way to say it, is that they haven't installed enough average speed cameras.

If you install a few of those, suddenly drivers do manage to keep to the speed limit.

The US system is stupid. Most drivers drive too fast and overestimate their driving capabilities.

I think it's important to note that the US approach to speed limits is absolute fucking garbage and maybe one should be able to expect people piloting a vehicle to actually read and follow speed limits

In Denmark we have the lovely new law that if you drive more than 100% over the speed limit and over 100 kmh or drive over 200 kmh at all or drunk driving with over 2‰ they confiscate the car and you are not getting it back at all. They confiscate the car regadles of who owns the car (with very few exceptions) and that is also if it is leased. So far since when the law started they have confiscated over 2000 cars in two years. It's my favourite law of all laws right now. The fine for driving crazy is also nicely proportional to your income and it removes the car so the person cannot just drive without license afterwards.